AdvanceAid

admin December 14th, 2011

A year ago, in the run up to the independence referendum and then to independence itself, there was widespread fear that there would be war between Sudan and the new state of South Sudan.  But in the event things passed off relatively quietly.

Since July’s independence, there has been ongoing, but relatively low-level, fighting and disturbances in the South Kordofan province of Sudan where the largely Nubian and Christian population is unhappy about being part of the largely Arab and Muslim state of Sudan.

SPLM-N fighter in Blue Nile state

But now, a year on from the initial concerns, the refugee numbers in South Sudan are building and there is a very real fear that there will be a border war between the two Sudans.

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Tags: Blue Nile, South Kordofan, South Sudan, Sudan, UNHCR

• East Africa , News , North Africa
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admin November 7th, 2011

African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released  by the US Department of Energy.

Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.

This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago.  And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen.  Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.

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Tags: Cancun, Carbon emissions, China, Climate change, Copenhagen, cyclone, Drought, Floods, Global warming, India, IPCC, Kyoto Protocol, natural disasters, USA

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin November 4th, 2011

The 2011 version of the Human Development Index (HDI) has been released and it’s predictably bad news for Africa.

The bottom of the pile – the Low Human Development sector – is dominated by sub-Saharan African countries.  Indeed, positions 159 – 187 in the table, the bottom twenty eight in the world, are all African with the exception of Afghanistan.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, HDI, Latin America, Mozambique, Niger, Norway

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin April 7th, 2011

South Sudan does not become independent until July, but some of the signs of imminent trouble are already apparent.

Reuters AlertNet is reporting today that tanks and attack helicopters are being moved by the North into the Muglad base that is close to Abyei.  Abyei is the oil-rich province that straddles the border between the North and the about-to-become-independent South and is considered the most likely region to reignite decades of violence between the mostly Muslim Arab north and the south, which mostly follows traditional beliefs or Christianity.

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Tags: Abyei, IDPs, Ivory Coast, Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, UN

• East Africa , North Africa
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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

• East Africa , News , North Africa , 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 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 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

• East Africa , Great Lakes , North Africa , South East Asia , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin June 26th, 2010

Five of the ten countries in the world with the least secure supplies of water are in Africa.  And Africa has the unpleasant honour of taking the top four places in a new report, ‘Water Security Risk Index’ published this week by Maplecroft, a firm specialising in corporate risk intelligence.

The top ten countries with the least secure supplies of water – shown in dark blue on the map below -  are 1. Somalia, 2. Mauritania, 3. Sudan, 4. Niger, 5. Iraq, 6. Uzbekistan, 7. Pakistan, 8. Egypt, 9. Turkmenistan and 10. Syria.

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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Egypt, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, Iceland, India, Iraq, Mauretania, New Zealand, Niger, Nile, Norway, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, UK, Uzbekistan

• East Africa , Middle East , North Africa , South Asia , West Africa
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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

• East Africa , Great Lakes , North Africa , Southern Africa , West Africa
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