admin January 7th, 2010
It’s almost biblical. First the people of Kenya suffer drought. Then the rains finally do come, but they come in volume and the hard dry ground cannot absorb the water so they get floods. Now the flooding is bringing the risk of disease – in particular water-borne diseases like cholera.
In northwest Kenya it is estimated that around 30,000 people are in urgent need of shelter, water, food and healthcare after heavy rainfall caused massive flooding, forcing thousands to leave their homes.
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Tags: Drought, Floods, Kenya, natural disasters, Red Cross
admin January 6th, 2010
As we celebrate, if that is the right word, the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, almost everyone involved in the humanitarian field is aware that the current way of dealing with emergencies is not working.
At a presentation in December, Ben Ramalingam of ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) outlined what he described as the ‘catastrophe-first’ model of lesson learning that he saw being applied to emergency response. And he also talked about the potential for setting up more corporate-humanitarian partnerships to help innovation in particular.
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Tags: ALNAP, Indian Ocean Tsunami, natural disasters, Private sector, Red Cross, UN
admin December 23rd, 2009
Localised, small-scale disasters in the Asia Pacific region have more than doubled in just the past four years according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
In 2004 the IFRC was dealing with 21 of these small-scale disasters a month. In 2008 that number rose to 51 per month. This general trend continued in 2009 with monthly figures increasing although the final tally for the year is not yet in.
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Tags: natural disasters, Phillipines, Red Cross, Vietnam
admin November 16th, 2009
Taking action before an emergency to reduce the damage caused and save millions of dollars (as well as lives) seems so commonsensical it’s a mystery that all of the money and brainpower of the donor community is not dedicated to it.
After all, no less an authority than the Red Cross has declared publicly that $1 spent in advance of a disaster is worth $4 spent afterwards.
And now, in a recent paper looking at the problems of famine in Ethiopia, Oxfam has added its voice to the chorus: “For Ethiopians it is more sustainable and dignified to identify and tackle the risk of disaster rather than simply waiting for disaster to strike…However Disaster Risk Management remains small scale…Ethiopians on the front line of climate change cannot wait another 25 years for common sense to become common practice”.
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Tags: Disaster Risk Management, Ethiopia, Oxfam, Red Cross
admin September 10th, 2009
In the Spring it’s the Zambezi that floods regularly – and the Red Cross is putting in place its Zambezi River Basin Initiative to try to tackle that.
But at this time of year the flooding problem is in West Africa. Just a couple of days ago the BBC was reporting that 350,000 people had been affected in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Niger and Senegal.
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Tags: Benin, Burkina Faso, Floods, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Red Cross, Senegal, UN, West Africa, WFP, Zambezi