AdvanceAid

admin March 24th, 2011

Africa still has more than 11 million displaced people, and accounts for 40% of all displaced people around the world according to the latest annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).  The IDMC says that globally, “the recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade.”

The number displaced in Africa at the end of 2010, 11.1 million, was the lowest for four years, although sadly recent events may well mean that that number – and indeed the four-year downward trend – is already out of date.
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Tags: DRC, IDMC, IDPs, Ivory Coast, Norwegian Refugee Council, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , South Asia , Southern Africa , West 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 January 22nd, 2011

Southern Africa is bracing itself for major flooding as heavy rains and some localized flooding across southern Africa from Angola to Madagascar are raising fears that the devastating floods of 2000 will be repeated.

An update produced last week by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that, “All countries in contiguous southern Africa are expected to receive normal to above-normal rainfall between January and March 2011 – northern Zimbabwe, central Zambia, southern Malawi, central Mozambique and most of Madagascar are expected to receive above-normal rainfall.”
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Tags: Angola, Botswana, Floods, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, natural disasters, OCHA, Okavanga, Red Cross, South Africa, UN, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• Southern Africa
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admin January 17th, 2011

We write a lot on this blog about disasters that are perceived not to have happened because they are not covered on CNN – or in the British papers.  Amongst the pernicious effects of this ‘not on CNN’ syndrome are not just the under-resourcing of smaller (and not so small if they are in Africa) emergencies, but the over-funding of the ones that do generate all of the media coverage.

But last week Valerie (Baroness) Amos, who took over as head of OCHA in July last year did something about this by allocating around $84m, as part of the first round of allocations for 2011 from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), to assist people affected by hunger, malnutrition, disease, displacement and conflict in 15 ‘neglected’ emergencies around the world.

Nearly three quarters of the $84m is going to ‘neglected’ emergencies (as defined by OCHA) in Africa.  And, to some extent, the locations of these emergencies will not surprise – Somalia receives $15m, the largest single allocation, with $11m going to Ethiopia.  Agencies working in Chad will receive $8m, while humanitarian partners in Kenya will receive $6 million to start up programmes for 2011.
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Tags: Baroness Amos, Burundi, Central African Republic, CERF, Chad, CNN, Colombia, DFID, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Madagascar, Myanmar, North Korea, OCHA, Palestine, Somalia, Sri Lanka, UN, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , Middle East , South Asia , South East Asia , West Africa
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admin November 12th, 2010

If anyone had any doubt that Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, had not benefited from decades of emphasis on ‘development’, the new Human Development Index (HDI) published earlier this month by UNDP as part of the Human Development Report 2010 gives sadly comprehensive evidence of failure.

UNDP administrator, Helen Clark, said, “The Report shows that people today are healthier, wealthier and better educated than before.”  And that may well be true for the world as a whole but for most sub-Saharan Africans that is just not the case.

The bottom fourteen countries in the HDI are all African (taking places 156-169).  And from 139th place onwards, the litany of African countries is only interrupted by Haiti and Afghanistan.  That, surely, says it all.  With just over 50 countries in the continent, thirty eight of the bottom places in the world are taken by African countries.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Algeria, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Gabon, Haiti, HDI, Libya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Tunisia, UNDP, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , West Africa
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admin July 19th, 2010

Total humanitarian aid worldwide was $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new report by Global Humanitarian Assistance.  In Part 1 we looked at how much was given.  In this part we are going to look at where the money goes.

By region, in 2008, it went largely to Africa (52% – $5.9 billion) and Asia (42% – $4.8 billion).  And six of the top ten recipient countries in 2008 were African – Sudan (first place), Ethiopia (fourth), Somalia (fifth), DRC (sixth), Zimbabwe (ninth) and Kenya (tenth).  Even tenth placed Kenya received $304 million.  Sudan got $1.4 billion.
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Tags: Africa, Asia, DRC, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, NGOs, Red Cross, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe

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admin March 9th, 2010

Like the water, trouble on the Zambezi cascades downstream.  And being last in line, Mozambique is generally the country that suffers the worst.  This year there has been a lot of rain ‘up country’.  Reports from Zimbabwe earlier this week talk of flooding in the north of the country in the wake of several weeks of continuous rain.  The Zambezi has broken its banks and people have had to be evacuated.

The authorities in Zimbabwe have said they would have to open the floodgates at Lake Kariba on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe because the banks were threatened.
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Tags: Floods, IDPs, Mozambique, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• News , Southern Africa
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admin March 3rd, 2010

It’s that time of year again and with predictable timing the Zambezi and other rivers that run through Mozambique are showing rising water levels and, in some cases, are already flooding.

Agence France Presse (AFP) is reporting that in Central Mozambique flooding on the Zambezi has forced around 900 people to leave their homes.
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Tags: Floods, Mozambique, natural disasters, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• Southern Africa
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admin December 4th, 2009

Water basin management, as we have commented before is a complex matter, rivers being no respecters of man-made boundaries.   And effective river basin management is key both when controlling usage and when managing flood risk.

So it is encouraging to hear that representatives of the seven countries that share the Zambezi basin – Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, and Namibia – have been meeting in Maputo this week, to plan coordinated actions to prevent and mitigate the effect of floods including the establishment of  an early warning system to alert communities living near the river’s banks, in the event of an impending emergency .
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Tags: Angola, Botswana, Floods, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe

• News , Southern Africa
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admin December 1st, 2009

The Conference of the Parties (COP), which is due to start in Copenhagen next Monday (Dec 7th), is said by many to be the most important international meeting EVER.  It’s especially important for the developing countries – many of them in Africa – that suffer most from the effects of global warming.

This is COP15, signifying that it is the fifteenth annual meeting to take place since the agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in June 1992. [Before you start to do the maths, the first COP took place in 1995 in Berlin].
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Tags: Afghanistan, Canada, China, Climate change, Copenhagen, Doha Round, Global warming, Iraq, Kyoto Protocol, Somalia, United States, WTO, Zimbabwe

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