admin July 31st, 2010
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting that almost 90,000 people have been displaced in the Beni Territory of the North Kivu Province in the eastern DRC following armed confrontations there. It says that the displaced people are in need of protection, food, water, shelters, medicines and non-food items. The 90,000 include unaccompanied children as well as other vulnerable people.
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Tags: DRC, IDPs, OCHA, Uganda
admin July 31st, 2010
In Thursday’s post we reported that floods were affecting Pakistan – possibly brought on by the La Niña effect. Today the BBC is reporting that one million people in Pakistan are affected by these floods, and that the city of Peshawar, with three million inhabitants, is cut off.
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Tags: Floods, La Nina, OCHA, Pakistan
admin July 21st, 2010
One Brit, Baroness Amos, is about to take over from another, Sir John Holmes as the head of OCHA. Her full title will be Under Secretary-General in charge of the Office of the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She moves to the UN from what sounds a much more comfortable role as British high commissioner to Australia. She spent four years in Tony Blair’s cabinet between 2003 and 2007, first as leader of the House of Lords and then as international development secretary in charge of DFID.
IRIN News, which is an OCHA project, has polled a number of NGOs and NGO networks to draw up a list of tasks for her once she takes over. Here’s a digested version of the list recommended:
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Tags: Baroness Amos, OCHA, Sir John Holmes, UN
admin June 18th, 2010
It’s almost exactly a month since this blog first wrote about the impending famine in West Africa and the aid agencies on the ground there have been predicting it for some months more. But in a classic example of the way that emergencies are handled, the world is only now beginning to see that something is going wrong there and it is already too late.
Credit: Cristina Vazquez Moreno/Oxfam
Malik Allaouna, regional emergency manager for Save the Children in West and Central Africa, told Reuters Alertnet, “The problem is that we are already too late. If you get the funds today, you don’t get the food in country for two to three months”. Ten million people across the Sahel – primarily in Niger and Chad – are at risk, and the signs of that risk have been there for as long as eight months.
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Tags: Chad, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Oxfam, Save the Children, UN, WFP
admin May 29th, 2010
For the third year in a row, David Dickie, CEO of Advance Aid, is going to be speaking at the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington in July.
He is part of a panel looking at ‘Moving from disaster relief to long-term development’. With him on the panel are: Beatriz Casals, Founder and President, Casals & Associates, Inc; Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, Chief of Policy and Development Branch, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA); Erin Mote, Director of Resource Development, CHF International; Joseph Fernandez, Founder & Executive Director, Trade Without Borders; and Abhas K. Jha, Regional Coordinator, The World Bank.
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Tags: Agility, Aidmatrix, Kuehne & Nagel, OCHA, USA
admin May 19th, 2010
At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s. This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million. Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.
Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN
admin March 16th, 2010
This blog has written several times about the refugees who have had to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and are currently in the Congo Republic. Now the UN is asking Northern countries to help raise $59m to help these refugees.
As with so many problems in the DRC, natural resources, in which the country is rich, are the cause of the refugee problem. The area that they have fled from is cobalt-rich and has been the site of armed clashes that originated in inter-communal disputes over farming and fishing rights.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, natural resources, OCHA, Refugees, UN
admin March 3rd, 2010
The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan. All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.
But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days. The current total, at the time of writing, is 366. For the past seven days.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Chile, China, CRED, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, natural disasters, North Korea, OCHA, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Storm, tsunami, USGS
admin February 26th, 2010
Haiti, of course, dominates the disaster-related news, and with good reason. But it also dominates the public perceptions of disasters and this means that donations are heavily skewed in a way that is probably helpful neither to the Haitians themselves, nor to the aid agencies that receive money specifically for Haiti, nor above all for the hundreds of thousands of people involved in other disasters around the world who get overlooked.
They get overlooked when it comes to money, and overlooked when it comes to the provision of relief services – so much time and effort is tied up in helping the people of Haiti.
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Tags: DRC, Haiti, natural disasters, OCHA, UN, Yemen
admin February 19th, 2010
Just one week after an ALNAP report overwhelmingly cited ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’ as the key problem facing humanitarian relief efforts, Sir John Holmes, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has attacked the Haiti relief effort for a failure of coordination.
In an internal email acquired by US title Foreign Policy Sir John especially picks out the cluster systems for criticism. Foreign Policy carries the email in full together with its own commentary.
Sir John starts by praising what has been achieved, but he quickly gets to the nub of his argument, “However, it is also clear that there remain major unmet humanitarian needs, particularly in critical areas such as shelter, other NFIs, and sanitation.” The upcoming rainy season, together with the threat of civil unrest if needs are not met, gives everything a particular urgency.
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Tags: Haiti, natural disasters, OCHA, UNICEF