admin January 22nd, 2011
Southern Africa is bracing itself for major flooding as heavy rains and some localized flooding across southern Africa from Angola to Madagascar are raising fears that the devastating floods of 2000 will be repeated.
An update produced last week by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that, “All countries in contiguous southern Africa are expected to receive normal to above-normal rainfall between January and March 2011 – northern Zimbabwe, central Zambia, southern Malawi, central Mozambique and most of Madagascar are expected to receive above-normal rainfall.”
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Tags: Angola, Botswana, Floods, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, natural disasters, OCHA, Okavanga, Red Cross, South Africa, UN, Zambezi, Zambia, Zimbabwe
admin 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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Tags: Actis, Andrew Mitchell, Commonwealth Development Corporation, DFID, LSE, South Korea, Uganda, Zambia
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 25th, 2010
If you keep your eyes open for these things, around the world there are regular small-scale disasters that show the impacts of global warming and climate change. Here in the UK it can be something as simple (as apparently silly?) as drought orders being applied for in north-west England just a few months after catastrophic floods.
On a larger scale, north-eastern Brazil has been hit by torrential floods which have left more than 40,000 people without shelter following the bursting of a river dam.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, UK
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
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 March 26th, 2010
The worst of this year’s flooding along the Zambezi and other rivers that flow through Mozambique seems to have passed. On Tuesday this week the Mozambique government downgraded its emergency status from Red to Orange and the Cahora Bassa dam began reducing its discharges of water.
Just a week ago, heavy rains across Southern Africa were causing flooding and landslides in Luanda (Angola) and flooding in Zambia in addition to what was then a Red state of emergency in Mozambique. Zambia reacted to the rainfall by opening up the Kariba dam to release pressure that was building, thus pushing more water downstream.
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Tags: Floods, Mozambique, Zambezi, Zambia