AdvanceAid

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

• East Africa , News
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admin April 19th, 2011

Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months.  Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.

Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting  that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.

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Tags: Climate change, Djibouti, Drought, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, IFRC, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, La Nina, Libya, Namibia, OCHA, Red Cross, Somalia, Uganda, UN, WHO

• East Africa , News , Southern 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 February 15th, 2011

Sometimes it does seem that the link between global warming and actual climate change is hard to establish.  We know from the massive evidence of the scientific literature that the earth is warming.  We know from our own experience that the climate is changing, but tying the two together can be hard.

But now Nature Climate Change has reported on an academic study that shows that spikes in Indian Ocean sea-surface temperature have changed the region’s weather patterns and triggered more frequent droughts in East Africa in recent decades.
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Tags: Climate change, Drought, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Kenya, natural disasters, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda

• East Africa
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admin October 28th, 2010

Speaking two weeks ago at the London School of Economics (LSE), Andrew Mitchell, UK Secretary of State for International Development, set out a series of sweeping changes that he plans to introduce at DFID, centred around ensuring that the private sector has a strong role to play in encouraging economic growth in the world’s poorest countries.

You can listen to the podcast of the whole speech here and download a transcript too.

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Tags: Actis, Andrew Mitchell, Commonwealth Development Corporation, DFID, LSE, South Korea, Uganda, Zambia

• News , South East Asia , Southern Africa
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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

• Great Lakes
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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 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 October 25th, 2009

On Friday last week the African Union (AU) adopted a new convention that will provide legal protection and assistance to millions of people displaced within their own countries by conflicts and natural calamities on the continent. All good stuff, but will it be more than window dressing, and will it make any real difference to the lives of the IDPs?

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Tags: African Union, Burundi, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, IDPs, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

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admin October 16th, 2009

According to a report published yesterday on IRIN, Africa hosts at least 11 million of the world’s 25 million conflict-affected internally displaced people (IDPs) and millions more are displaced annually by natural disasters.

For example, Sudan has an estimated 4-5 million IDPs, thanks to the recent civil war in the south, and violence in Darfur and the east.

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Tags: Central African Republic, Chad, DRC, IDPs, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda

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