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 January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
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Tags: Cambodia, China, Climate change, CRED, Djibouti, Drought, earthquake, Global warming, Japan, natural disasters, New Zealand, Niger, Philippines, Somalia, Thailand, USA
admin January 19th, 2012
A report this week by Oxfam and Save the Children has concluded that many lives were lost, livelihoods unnecessarily ruined and a lot of donor money wasted because the early warnings about the famine in the Horn of Africa were not heeded and not acted upon.
Readers of this blog will not be surprised by this conclusion, as we wrote back in July how the early warnings had been ignored for a year by the international community with the result that food aid had to be flown in by the 747-load, when other, more cost-effective and more life-saving, procedures could otherwise have been followed.
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Tags: Drought, Ethiopia, Famine, FEWS, Kenya, natural disasters, Oxfam, Save the Children, Somalia
admin December 4th, 2011
The population in war-torn Somalia received another blow last week as Al Shabaab banned 16 aid agencies from territory that it controls, including UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, UNHCR, Norwegian Church Aid and others from Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France.
These aid agencies were banned, according to Al Shabaab, because they were “fostering secularism”, “amplifying the refugee crisis”, “financing, aiding, and abetting subversive groups seeking to destroy the basic tenets of Islamic penal system” and “undermining the livelihoods and cultural values of the population.”
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Tags: Al Shabaab, Baroness Amos, Dadaab, Denmark, Drought, Famine, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, natural disasters, Norway, OCHA, Somalia, Sweden, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO
admin December 3rd, 2011
Good news for sub-Saharan Africa – it’s not as corrupt as some other parts of the world according to the latest Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International (TI). Although there’s still quite a lot of work to be done if you have a look at the colourful map on page four of the TI report.
Unlike the recently-published 2011 version of the Human Development Index, in which the bottom places were packed with sub-Saharan African countries – and Afghanistan – there are a mere four African countries in the bottom ten of this global table. Somalia comes equal bottom with North Korea, and the other African countries in the Highly Corrupt group are Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Burundi.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, France, Germany, HDI, Mauritius, New Zealand, North Korea, Portugal, Rwanda, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Transparency International, UK, USA
admin October 11th, 2011
Two containers loaned by Advance Aid are being used in the Dadaab refugee camp as a logistics base. The containers provide instant secure storage and, being insulated, also remain relatively cool.
You can read the full story here.
And this is one of the containers in situ:
Instant secure storage at Dadaab
Tags: Agility, Dadaab, Drought, Kenya, natural disasters, Somalia, World Vision
admin September 21st, 2011
Two container loads of Advance Aid-supplied emergency kits – part of our partnership with World Vision and Agility – are seen leaving for Dadaab recently.
Leaving the Agility yard in Nairobi
Each forty foot container has 500 emergency kits inside, each kit will provide the basics for a family of five, so these two trucks are carrying supplies that will help 5,000 people in the Dadaab camp.
Each forty foot container holds 500 kits
Tags: Dadaab, Kenya, natural disasters, Refugees, Somalia, World Vision
admin September 16th, 2011
African-produced emergency kits sourced for World Vision by Advance Aid are now being distributed to the refugees flooding into the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.
Kits for distribution
Each kit is designed to provide the basics for a family of five and contains a tarpaulin for shelter, blankets, a family-size mosquito net, a kitchen set, a hygiene kit and one bucket for clean water and another for washing.
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Tags: Dadaab, emergency kits, Famine, Kenya, natural disasters, Refugees, Somalia, World Vision
admin August 2nd, 2011
Sadly for the people suffering in the Horn of Africa, the famine there is destined to become a case history of international inaction in advance of a known disaster, a ‘How not to do it’ of emergency preparation and response. And all of the key players – governments, aid agencies, UN organisations – are already lining up to say that it was not their fault, even before the much-needed aid has really begun to arrive.
The first jolt to the emergency relief system was delivered by the Tsunami at Xmas 2004 when the existing systems were found wanting. In particular, too many organisations turned up to help with little or no coordination. Chaos ensued.
Some progress had been made on this front by the time the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, but there was still a fair amount of chaos.
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Tags: Al Shabaab, Andrew Mitchell, BBC, DFID, earthquake, Ethiopia, Famine, FEWS, Haiti, Kenya, Mogadishu, Somalia, tsunami, WFP
admin July 18th, 2011
‘Communication problems’ meant that warnings one year ago forecasting a drought in the Horn of Africa were ignored by planners who could have prepared a timely response. The result is a massive airlift costing huge sums of money.
No one is in any doubt that the drought that is hitting the Horn of Africa at the moment is a major humanitarian crisis but compare and contrast these two stories that relate to it.
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Tags: Addis Ababa, Dadaab, Djibouti, Drought, Dubai, Ethiopia, FEWS, Horn of Africa, Humanitarian Futures Programme, Kenya, Kuwait, Nairobi, Pakistan, Randolph Kent, Somalia, Uganda, UNHCR
