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 June 9th, 2010
Water is one of the planet’s great Commons, and ‘Tackling the World Water Crisis’, which is available here is the latest contribution to a rapidly growing literature looking at the threat of water shortages as the world’s population grows and our water use grows exponentially.
Published by the Foreign Policy Centre, it is a collection of articles by politicians such as new Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU foreign minister Baroness Catherine Ashton, journalists from the BBC and the Financial Times, leaders of NGOs like ActionAid and WWF-UK, plus assorted academics and think-tank heads.
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Tags: ActionAid, Bangladesh, BBC, China, Climate change, Financial Times, Ganges, Global warming, Himalaya, India, Mekong, natural disasters, Nile, Peru, Sahel, WWF, Yemen
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
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 29th, 2010
As a world, we rely massively on two liquids – oil and water. Wars have already been fought over diminishing supplies of the one and it will not be long before wars are fought over the diminishing supply of the other. And whilst it is relatively easy to see how we could replace oil – renewable energy sources, principally solar, changes in economic patterns, the death of globalisation – it is impossible to replace water.
Cue a row that has broken out over the ‘rights’ to the water that flows down the Nile. River basins are one of the planet’s major communal assets – one of the great Commons, like the air – and also politically one of the most fraught.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nile, Ruaha, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambezi