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although sadly recent events may well mean that that number – and indeed the four-year downward trend – is already out of date.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 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 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.

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Tags: Aid, earthquake, Haiti, Indian Ocean Tsunami, natural disasters, NGOs, UN

• Americas , South Asia , South East Asia
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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.
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Tags: Cancun, China, Copenhagen, Floods, Germany, Global warming, India, Japan, natural disasters, Pakistan, Russia, USA

• Americas , South Asia
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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.
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Tags: Benin, Floods, Haiti, natural disasters, Pakistan, Plan International, Red Cross, UNICEF

• Americas , South Asia , West Africa
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admin September 6th, 2010

The “UK provides a model for private funding of emergencies” according to a story today on IRIN News.  IRIN is a UN OCHA project.

Well, as Evelyn Waugh famously wrote in Scoop, “Up to a point, Lord Copper” which, for those uninitiated in the wonders of Scoop, was his hero’s way of saying ‘No’ to the particularly monstrous newspaper proprietor for whom he worked.

Although maybe it would be fairer to say that the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), for that is the ‘private model’ to which the story refers, is one of the least bad ways of organising private responses (i.e. responses by individuals) to emergencies.  DEC has thirteen member agencies and they are: ActionAid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International UK, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.
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Tags: ActionAid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International UK, Chad, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, DEC, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Niger, OCHA, Oxfam, Pakistan, Save the Children, Tearfund, UNICEF, World Vision

• South Asia , West Africa
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admin September 1st, 2010

Job creation and enterprise development are one of the key elements of Advance Aid’s mission in Africa and we have been delighted to be able to assist with the establishment of a new tarpaulin factory in Athi River, outside Nairobi.

Owned and run by Reltex Africa, the factory opened earlier this summer and is already employing 200 people, with 300 employees the target.  What is more, it is now exporting tarpaulins to Pakistan to help with the relief effort there.

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Tags: Floods, Kenya, Pakistan, Red Cross

• East Africa , South Asia , South East Asia
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admin August 30th, 2010

The eyes of the world, of course, are on Pakistan and the terrible damage and displacement that the floods there are causing.  But in West Africa a crisis of similar proportions is affecting just as many people – but generating only a tiny percentage of the column inches (or the donor dollars) that accrue to Pakistan.

First, drought led to crop failures and the threat of famine – especially in Niger and Chad, where more than seven million people are affected.  Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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Tags: Chad, China, Drought, Floods, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan, UN

• South Asia , South East Asia , West Africa
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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.
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Tags: Chad, Floods, Haiti, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan

• Americas , South Asia , South East Asia , West Africa
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admin August 3rd, 2010

The complexities of global warming and the interconnectedness of world markets have been starkly illustrated this week.  And, as so often, the people to suffer from these random events are the poor in general and the African poor in particular.

As the worst famine for several years stalks Niger and Chad, IRIN News reports that the 2010 rainy season in West Africa has opened with hail storms in Guinea and the heaviest rain in 50 years in northern Chad.  Floods have killed at least 80 people and destroyed homes, bridges, septic tanks, livestock, crops and food stocks; dams have broken, and wells and latrines and have been submerged.
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Tags: Chad, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, natural disasters, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, UNICEF

• Europe , South Asia , West Africa
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