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 November 9th, 2011
It’s not very often that a simple analogy can capture and dramatise a complex phenomenon. But we were offered one yesterday at PA International’s ‘Combating Malnutrition through Sustainable Interventions’ conference in Brussels.
Amir Mahmoud Abdulla, Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme, turned the dry statistic that 3.5 million children die each year from malnutrition into a gripping and moving story.
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Tags: Drought, Famine, natural disasters, WFP
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 April 4th, 2011
The Ashdown Committee’s report, amongst other things, provides a breakdown of where DFID’s spending on humanitarian aid goes. The sums involved are substantial – £528 million in 2009/10 – that was spent as follows:
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Tags: CERF, Crown Agents, DFID, HERR, ICRC, Lord Paddy Ashdown, NGOs, OCHA, Red Cross, Save the Children, UN, UNDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP
admin March 23rd, 2011
We’ve written often in this blog about ‘forgotten’ crises, emergencies that don’t make it to the Ten O’Clock News and so somehow don’t exist. The knock-on effects of this are terrible – a failure to respond, driven often by a failure to raise the money needed to buy the necessary goods.
Now, with Japan dominating the natural disaster headlines and the war in/on Libya dominating the man-made disaster headlines, events in Ivory Coast are being almost completely overlooked, not to mention the plight of Africans fleeing south out of Libya. And then there’s the looming prospect of conflict over oil between Sudan and (come July) newly-independent South Sudan.
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Tags: Algeria, Egypt, IDPs, International Organisation for Migration, Ivory Coast, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, UNHCR, WFP
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 20th, 2010
The situation in Somalia seems to be going from worse to even worse. According to a recent UN report, 3.4 million Somalis – 43 percent of the population – need humanitarian assistance, including some 1.4 million within Somalia displaced by fighting. This infighting between Islamist insurgent groups Al-Shabab and Hisbul Islam and the transitional government further weakens a country that has been without an effective government since 1991.
Over the past few weeks: UNHCR has appealed for an additional $60m for IDPs within Somalia as well as those refugees now in neighbouring countries; a UN committee has said that as much as half of the food aid sent to the country via the World Food Programme (WFP) is diverted corruptly; and the breakaway enclave of Somaliland has finally set June 26th as its long-delayed presidential election date, which will probably be a further step in the break-up of the country.
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Tags: African Union, Djibouti, Ethiopia, IDPs, Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, UN, UNHCR, WFP
admin February 5th, 2010
Where there are vulnerable people, masses of money (and goods like food aid) with little accountability and people in positions of power over the people and the assets, corruption is always liable to raise its ugly head.
Transparency International (TI) has been in the forefront of the battle against corruption worldwide for 17 years and it has now followed up its 2006 report on Mapping the Risks of Corruption in Humanitarian Action, with publication of a handbook on Preventing Corruption in Humanitarian Operations. It can be downloaded here.
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Tags: Corruption, Haiti, Transparency International, WFP
admin January 5th, 2010
Yet another example of the small-scale disasters that just do not make the news in the North is provided this week by Somalia.
IRIN, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is reporting that 30 – 40,000 people have been displaced by fighting around the central Somalia town of Dusamareb. A weekend of fighting at the turn of the year between Islamist groups killed dozens and left many others injured, locals told IRIN.
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Tags: Somalia, WFP
admin November 27th, 2009
As an example of the chaos and disruption that goes on in Africa without people in the North really noticing, two stories on Reuters’ AlertNet caught the eye. In the first it was reported that the World Food Programme (WFP) next week will start distributing food aid to more than 50,000 people driven out of their homes by ethnic violence in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This outbreak of fighting, which is unrelated to simmering rebel violence in the mineral-rich east, erupted at the end of last month and has forced more than 38,000 people to flee across the border into neighbouring Congo Republic and displaced 14,000 others internally, according to the WFP.
All of these people are likely to be needing shelter as well as food aid.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, IDPs, natural resources, Refugees, WFP
