admin May 17th, 2010
Whilst East Africa faces natural disaster in the form of floods, West Africa is facing starvation and famine as a result of the irregularity of the rains in 2009. So irregular were the rains, that there was flooding in some countries and drought in others.
Credit: Cristina Vazquez Moreno/Oxfam
This led to a severe lack of pasture, water and a poor harvest. The worst affected country now, according to Oxfam, is Niger where 8 million people are at risk. An additional 2 million people are also threatened in Chad and a substantial number of people are expected to be affected in Mali in the coming months. Parts of Nigeria and Burkina Faso are also at risk.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Drought, EU, Human Development Index, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, UN
admin January 15th, 2010
As the news this morning reports rising anger in Haiti at the ongoing failure of aid and relief supplies to arrive on the island, one thing is clear – the world was not ready.
That is not to say that we should all have foreseen a ‘once-in-200-years’ event. Or that we should have known that it was going to happen this week on Haiti. And it is not to underplay the devastation to an already weak infrastructure that has been caused by the earthquake. The level of devastation is such that it clearly makes it even harder to get such goods as are available onto the island.
But it is still true to say that we were not ready. There were not sufficient stockpiles of basic goods and medical supplies nearby, or even in the same hemisphere. None of this is the fault of the aid agencies who are, as always, achieving miracles with the resources that they have available. But the way that the emergency relief system operates works against them.
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Tags: cyclone, earthquake, Haiti, Human Development Index, Myanmar, natural disasters
admin January 10th, 2010
Excuse the tabloid style headline on this post, but when an eminent academic economist produces evidence that, despite the influx of billions of dollars of aid – some of which, of course, flowed out just as quickly to Swiss bank accounts – sub-Saharan Africa has gone backwards over the period 1970-2000 it merits a ‘shock horror’ type of response.
Not that sub-Saharan Africa is alone amongst poor regions in getting poorer. Or that, here at Advance Aid, we are that surprised, pushing as we are the view that ‘Trade not Aid’ is the answer to getting real development moving in Africa.
The analysis has been carried out by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and has been recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the title ‘Nature’s role in sustaining economic development’. Interested readers can download a copy of the full paper here. It’s well worth a read.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Human Development Index, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sustainable development, Trade not Aid