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
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
admin June 29th, 2010
The number of natural disasters around the world fell year-on-year in 2009 according to the Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2009 produced by CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). And it also fell below the 2000-08 average.
But CRED, which is a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, warns that although the upward trend in disaster occurrence has stabilized in 2009 it is not possible to identify a trend from this fact: “In general, a high variation exists in the reported number of deaths and victims from one year to the next. This is mostly due to single disaster events that cause a tremendous human impact.” In 2009 there were no events like the 2002 drought in India (300 million victims), the 2004 Tsunami (226,408 deaths across 12 countries) or cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in 2008 causing 138,366 deaths.
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Tags: China, CRED, cyclone, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Global warming, India, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Storm, WHO
admin June 21st, 2010
As famine closes in on Chad and Niger (and Save the Children says that nearly 400,000 children under the age of five in Niger are facing starvation) ActionAid is asking whether the G8 countries have made good on promises made last year to give $22 billion to help small farmers in developing countries.
Key to this proposal was that the money should go not in emergency food aid, or in aid to boost production of cash crops for export, but to help smallholder farmers. The importance of smallholders is that they grow food to feed themselves and their families, with surpluses generally sold in local markets. So this is an important step towards increasing food security and self-sufficiency in food at the local level in developing countries.
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Tags: ActionAid, Australia, Chad, EU, Famine, G8, Germany, Italy, Japan, natural disasters, Niger, Save the Children, Spain
admin June 15th, 2010
It’s no wonder really that there is general confusion about aid and the role that it should, or should not, play in development. Just in the last week there have been two arguments put forward by “people who should know” which put contrasting points of view.
Here at Advance Aid we have always argued that aid has clearly not succeeded in lifting sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty and that therefore a different, more grass-roots approach is needed.
Now, on one side of the argument, AidWatch, a coalition of the great and good from the NGO world, put out its annual report calling for the countries of the EU to live up to their promises and move rapidly towards donating 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in development aid.
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Tags: ActionAid, Aid, EU, Kenya, Nigeria
admin May 31st, 2010
ONE, the organisation founded by Bono, Bob Geldof and others, delivered its 2010 Data Report last week. Much was made in the press of its praise of the UK and condemnation of Italy for respectively hitting and nowhere near hitting their aid targets.
But the real elephant in the room got relatively little notice. Almost nothing has been done since the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 on the question that most holds back real economic progress in Africa – grossly unfair trade rules and tariff barriers imposed by the industrialised North on the developing countries of the South.
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Tags: Bob Geldof, Bono, G7, G8, Gleneagles, ONE, Rwanda, Trade not Aid
admin May 19th, 2010
At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s. This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million. Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.
Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN
admin May 19th, 2010
Water in Africa has been one of the themes of this blog. Too often there’s either too much of it or too little. Both cause natural disasters. And the impression that can be given is that Africa mostly has too little water – you only have to think about all of the famine coverage, going back to the Ethiopian famine in 1984 that led to the Band Aid and Live Aid responses in the North.
But it’s not as simple as that, as is very clearly outlined in a report produced last year by bankers Standard Chartered. ‘The Water Report – The Real Liquidity Crisis’ was published a year ago but has just come to our attention.
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Tags: Drought, Ethiopia, Floods, natural disasters, Standard Chartered
admin April 19th, 2010
Imagine if an airport in a European or an American country (that’s North, South or even Central America) had been captured by rebel fighters and only regained after an assault by local army troops supported by UN peacekeepers in which several UN troops were killed. What’s more, this is the airport where the world’s largest UN mission has aircraft stationed
It would lead the news for days.
But in the DRC, it would appear, it merits little more than a footnote. In this action, three UN personnel, including a Ghanaian peacekeeper and a South African pilot, were reported killed, as well as four government soldiers, two police officers and nine rebels.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, natural resources, UN
admin March 16th, 2010
This blog has written several times about the refugees who have had to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and are currently in the Congo Republic. Now the UN is asking Northern countries to help raise $59m to help these refugees.
As with so many problems in the DRC, natural resources, in which the country is rich, are the cause of the refugee problem. The area that they have fled from is cobalt-rich and has been the site of armed clashes that originated in inter-communal disputes over farming and fishing rights.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, natural resources, OCHA, Refugees, UN