admin January 25th, 2012
Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years. And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.
We know already that the European Union has taken a lead. And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.
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Tags: CERF, Chad, DFID, Drought, Ethiopia, EU, Famine, Kenya, Mali, natural disasters, Niger, Sahel, Somalia, UNICEF, WFP
admin December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Disaster Risk Reduction, Drought, EU, Floods, Global warming, Japan, LSE, Mali, Mauritania, natural disasters, Niger, Nigeria, Sahel, Thailand, World Bank
admin November 15th, 2010
Hypocrisy is deeply unattractive – especially when it comes in the form of calls by Northern countries for free trade to ‘help the poor’. Calls that totally ignore all of the restrictive trade practices that they themselves maintain in order to protect their voters/farmers/industries from competition from these same poor.
Take cotton. At the G20 meeting in Seoul just a week ago the UK and others called for a free trade area for Africa – in effect a merging of the existing three trade groups, EAC, ECOWAS and SADC.
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Tags: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, China, David Cameron, Doha Round, EAC, ECOWAS, EU, G20, HDI, India, Mali, SADC, USA
admin September 17th, 2010
Floods have been everywhere in the news recently, and UNHCR is now reporting that 150,000 people in Chad have been affected by flooding in recent weeks, including 70,000 who have become homeless because their homes were destroyed.
They are suffering from the heaviest rains to hit that part of the country for 40 years – this rain following on from a fierce drought. UNHCR says that, “Humanitarian access to affected areas across Chad remains a challenge due to destroyed roads and bridges in areas where populations are in need of help.” Early in August, northern Chad was hit by what were reported to be the heaviest rains for 50 years.
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Tags: Chad, Drought, FEWS, Floods, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, OCHA, UNHCR
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
