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admin November 4th, 2011

The 2011 version of the Human Development Index (HDI) has been released and it’s predictably bad news for Africa.

The bottom of the pile – the Low Human Development sector – is dominated by sub-Saharan African countries.  Indeed, positions 159 – 187 in the table, the bottom twenty eight in the world, are all African with the exception of Afghanistan.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, HDI, Latin America, Mozambique, Niger, Norway

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin March 2nd, 2011

DFID yesterday announced the results of its bilateral aid programme and the decision that has been made is that it will be focussing its money on 27 countries, many of them in East Africa.  The review says that it wants to target support “where it will make the biggest difference and where the need is greatest”.

These 27 countries, according to DFID, account for three quarters of global maternal mortality and nearly three quarters of global malaria deaths.  And seventeen of them are in Africa: Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda , Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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Tags: Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, DFID, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin January 22nd, 2011

Southern Africa is bracing itself for major flooding as heavy rains and some localized flooding across southern Africa from Angola to Madagascar are raising fears that the devastating floods of 2000 will be repeated.

An update produced last week by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that, “All countries in contiguous southern Africa are expected to receive normal to above-normal rainfall between January and March 2011 – northern Zimbabwe, central Zambia, southern Malawi, central Mozambique and most of Madagascar are expected to receive above-normal rainfall.”
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Tags: Angola, Botswana, Floods, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, natural disasters, OCHA, Okavanga, Red Cross, South Africa, UN, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• Southern Africa
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admin November 12th, 2010

If anyone had any doubt that Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, had not benefited from decades of emphasis on ‘development’, the new Human Development Index (HDI) published earlier this month by UNDP as part of the Human Development Report 2010 gives sadly comprehensive evidence of failure.

UNDP administrator, Helen Clark, said, “The Report shows that people today are healthier, wealthier and better educated than before.”  And that may well be true for the world as a whole but for most sub-Saharan Africans that is just not the case.

The bottom fourteen countries in the HDI are all African (taking places 156-169).  And from 139th place onwards, the litany of African countries is only interrupted by Haiti and Afghanistan.  That, surely, says it all.  With just over 50 countries in the continent, thirty eight of the bottom places in the world are taken by African countries.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Algeria, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Gabon, Haiti, HDI, Libya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Tunisia, UNDP, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , West Africa
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admin July 29th, 2010

Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.

“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO

• Americas , East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , North Africa , South Asia , South East Asia , Southern Africa
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admin June 25th, 2010

If you keep your eyes open for these things, around the world there are regular small-scale disasters that show the impacts of global warming and climate change.  Here in the UK it can be something as simple (as apparently silly?) as drought orders being applied for in north-west England just a few months after catastrophic floods.

On a larger scale, north-eastern Brazil has been hit by torrential floods which have left more than 40,000 people without shelter following the bursting of a river dam.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, UK

• Europe , Latin America , Southern Africa
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admin April 29th, 2010

As a world, we rely massively on two liquids – oil and water.  Wars have already been fought over diminishing supplies of the one and it will not be long before wars are fought over the diminishing supply of the other.  And whilst it is relatively easy to see how we could replace oil – renewable energy sources, principally solar, changes in economic patterns, the death of globalisation – it is impossible to replace water.

Cue a row that has broken out over the ‘rights’ to the water that flows down the Nile.  River basins are one of the planet’s major communal assets – one of the great Commons, like the air – and also politically one of the most fraught.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nile, Ruaha, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambezi

• East Africa , North Africa
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admin March 26th, 2010

The worst of this year’s flooding along the Zambezi and other rivers that flow through Mozambique seems to have passed.  On Tuesday this week the Mozambique government downgraded its emergency status from Red to Orange and the Cahora Bassa dam began reducing its discharges of water.

Just a week ago, heavy rains across Southern Africa were causing flooding and landslides in Luanda (Angola) and flooding in Zambia in addition to what was then a Red state of emergency in Mozambique.  Zambia reacted to the rainfall by opening up the Kariba dam to release pressure that was building, thus pushing more water downstream.

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Tags: Floods, Mozambique, Zambezi, Zambia

• News , Southern Africa
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admin March 9th, 2010

Like the water, trouble on the Zambezi cascades downstream.  And being last in line, Mozambique is generally the country that suffers the worst.  This year there has been a lot of rain ‘up country’.  Reports from Zimbabwe earlier this week talk of flooding in the north of the country in the wake of several weeks of continuous rain.  The Zambezi has broken its banks and people have had to be evacuated.

The authorities in Zimbabwe have said they would have to open the floodgates at Lake Kariba on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe because the banks were threatened.
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Tags: Floods, IDPs, Mozambique, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• News , Southern Africa
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admin March 3rd, 2010

It’s that time of year again and with predictable timing the Zambezi and other rivers that run through Mozambique are showing rising water levels and, in some cases, are already flooding.

Agence France Presse (AFP) is reporting that in Central Mozambique flooding on the Zambezi has forced around 900 people to leave their homes.
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Tags: Floods, Mozambique, natural disasters, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• Southern Africa
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