admin January 11th, 2011
‘Haiti and Truth about NGOs’ was an extraordinary programme on Radio 4 this morning. If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can catch it again at 2130 tonight on Radio 4 or listen to it again here.
Described as an ‘Insight into the aid industry as it faces challenging times’, reporter/presenter Edward Stourton raises a lot of the issues that will be familiar to aid industry professionals – speed of response (or lack of it) in the face of massive disaster, the relative lack of Disaster Risk Reduction, the lack of any real stockpile of emergency goods, the ability of thousands of NGOs to land on a disaster and sometimes make things worse rather than better despite the best coordination efforts of the Clusters.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Aid, earthquake, Haiti, Indian Ocean Tsunami, natural disasters, NGOs, UN
admin November 18th, 2010
“Is Humanitarian Aid Bad for Africa?” asks Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe & Mail.
And the Globe & Mail has been paying a lot of attention to this subject over the past month, with a news story on Oct 19th reporting that, “The Canadian government says it is ‘deeply concerned’ by a report that its foreign aid to Ethiopia is being used as a weapon to crush political dissent and bolster the power of the ruling party.” This followed an editorial the previous day, which picked up on a Human Rights Watch report that alleged that aid distribution in Ethiopia was tied into loyalty to the ruling political party.
Well, the “Is Aid Bad for Africa?” question is a massive one that, in its bald form, is very hard to answer with a simple “Yes” or a “No”. What humanitarian aid are we talking about, in what circumstances, in which country? Although it has to be said that Dambisa Moyo, in her famous book ‘Dead Aid’, clearly felt that the answer was “Yes” and argued that all aid to Africa should be run down and then stopped over a very short timescale.
Continue Reading »
Tags: BBC, Bob Geldof, Dambisa Moyo, Ethiopia, Haiti
admin November 16th, 2010
So it would appear that it takes the inundation of 160,000 square kilometres of land, an estimated 1,600 deaths and 20 million people affected by flooding for Pakistan – a tiny emitter of greenhouse gases – to decide that it needs a climate change strategy to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events caused by global warming.
What, therefore, is it going to take for the major emitters of CO2 – China, the US, Russia, India, Japan and Germany in total tonnage rank – to do the same and really start to get to grips with the emissions that they are generating? After all, it is these emissions that are the root cause of the melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush. And it is the meltwater from these glaciers that, along with unusually high rainfall, caused the flooding.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Cancun, China, Copenhagen, Floods, Germany, Global warming, India, Japan, natural disasters, Pakistan, Russia, USA
admin October 27th, 2010
Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world – and certainly invisible when competing with stories from Pakistan or even Haiti, where cholera has now raised its ugly head – the West African state of Benin has been devastated by floods over the past two weeks.
Just over a week ago UNICEF reported that it was responding to mass flooding that had covered more that two thirds of the country. Unseasonably heavy rains had caused the Oueme and Mono rivers to overflow and the resulting floods destroyed homes, schools and health centres, claiming 43 lives and leaving nearly 100,000 homeless.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Benin, Floods, Haiti, natural disasters, Pakistan, Plan International, Red Cross, UNICEF
admin August 10th, 2010
Shortly after we published the last entry on this blog, where we asked why there had been no DEC appeal, DEC announced that it was mounting a coordinated appeal for money to help the estimated 15 million people now affected by the floods in Pakistan. You can donate here.
The 15 million figure comes from Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) who said on Monday that, if the Pakistan government’s calculations are correct, the scale of the disaster could be worse than Haiti’s January earthquake, the 2004 Tsunami, and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake combined.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Chad, Floods, Haiti, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan
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.
Continue Reading »
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
admin March 3rd, 2010
The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan. All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.
But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days. The current total, at the time of writing, is 366. For the past seven days.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Afghanistan, Chile, China, CRED, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, natural disasters, North Korea, OCHA, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Storm, tsunami, USGS
admin February 26th, 2010
Haiti, of course, dominates the disaster-related news, and with good reason. But it also dominates the public perceptions of disasters and this means that donations are heavily skewed in a way that is probably helpful neither to the Haitians themselves, nor to the aid agencies that receive money specifically for Haiti, nor above all for the hundreds of thousands of people involved in other disasters around the world who get overlooked.
They get overlooked when it comes to money, and overlooked when it comes to the provision of relief services – so much time and effort is tied up in helping the people of Haiti.
Continue Reading »
Tags: DRC, Haiti, natural disasters, OCHA, UN, Yemen
admin February 19th, 2010
Just one week after an ALNAP report overwhelmingly cited ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’ as the key problem facing humanitarian relief efforts, Sir John Holmes, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has attacked the Haiti relief effort for a failure of coordination.
In an internal email acquired by US title Foreign Policy Sir John especially picks out the cluster systems for criticism. Foreign Policy carries the email in full together with its own commentary.
Sir John starts by praising what has been achieved, but he quickly gets to the nub of his argument, “However, it is also clear that there remain major unmet humanitarian needs, particularly in critical areas such as shelter, other NFIs, and sanitation.” The upcoming rainy season, together with the threat of civil unrest if needs are not met, gives everything a particular urgency.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Haiti, natural disasters, OCHA, UNICEF
admin February 17th, 2010
The lesson, it is said, that bankers have learnt from the events of the past two years, is that they are, in effect, insured against failure. So casino bankers can carry on making big bets, take the winnings when they win and pass off the losses onto the taxpayers.
We have recently come across an academic paper from Harvard Business School (HBS) that argues that developing country governments do not invest (and do not need to invest) in disaster preparedness because they know that the international community will bail them out (for free) when disaster strikes. So they are insured against losses that are caused by disasters.
The relationship between developing countries and humanitarian relief is thus similar to that between bankers and taxpayers. In the words of the HBS paper, “international relief effectively rewards bad behaviour on the part of the poor countries’ governments”. You can download a copy here.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Christian Aid, Harvard Business School, natural disasters
