Archive for the 'South East Asia' Category

Baroness Amos gives $84m to ‘neglected’ emergencies

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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Ed Stourton calls the humanitarian industry to account

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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New Mitchell broom sweeps the private sector into DFID

October 28th, 2010

Speaking two weeks ago at the London School of Economics (LSE), Andrew Mitchell, UK Secretary of State for International Development, set out a series of sweeping changes that he plans to introduce at DFID, centred around ensuring that the private sector has a strong role to play in encouraging economic growth in the world’s poorest countries.

You can listen to the podcast of the whole speech here and download a transcript too.

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New African tarpaulin factory exports aid goods to Pakistan

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.

Reltex_Exports3

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Will compassion stretch as far as the Sahel?

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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DEC comes out with Pakistan appeal as 15 million are affected. But what about the starving millions in the Sahel?

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.
Pakistan floods_Aug10
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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La Niña phenomenon leads to Asian flooding with threat of more disasters to come

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.

Flooding_Phillipines_Ondoy

“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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Natural disasters fall in 2009 – but no evidence of a downward trend

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.
Zambezi flooding in Zambia
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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Thoughts on ‘Tackling the World’s Water Crisis’

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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Time to face up to the problems of managing water from the Third Pole

May 24th, 2010

The problems of managing the waters of the Nile, which we wrote about here recently pale into insignificance when you consider the problems of managing the waters that flow down from Hindu-Kush Himalaya region (HKH).  Advance Aid was at the House of Lords in London last week for the launch of a report on the waters of the HKH titled ‘The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of threat, sources of survival’.

One fifth of humanity is sustained by the waters that flow down from the HKH, including some or all of the populations of the most populous countries on earth – Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan.  And it is the source of ten major Asian river systems, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong and Yellow rivers.  As the report says, these drainage basins are “one of the world’s most complex and intensive risk hotspots.  This water system could be involved in future crises concerning dams, river diversions, floods, water shortages and contamination”.
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