admin February 17th, 2012
Just over a year ago the whole world was fearful of war, death and displacement in Sudan. The referendum in early January had gone off remarkably smoothly and the South was set to secede, but still there was fear of war at any time between January and July – when South Sudan was due to become Africa’s newest state.
All of that went off pretty smoothly, with limited disruption. The world breathed a sigh of relief. But now the border tensions between Sudan and South Sudan, not to mention the troubled question of oil, has seen war break out, with heavy fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states that has driven more than 130,000 Sudanese refugees into Ethiopia and South Sudan.
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Tags: Blue Nile, Ethiopia, Famine, Sahel, Somalia, South Kordofan, South Sudan, Sudan, UN, UNHCR
admin January 25th, 2012
Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years. And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.
We know already that the European Union has taken a lead. And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.
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Tags: CERF, Chad, DFID, Drought, Ethiopia, EU, Famine, Kenya, Mali, natural disasters, Niger, Sahel, Somalia, UNICEF, WFP
admin December 11th, 2011
If you are not already a fan of TED, you should be. TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to a concept it calls ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ and there are some fabulous ideas on there, beautifully and succinctly presented.
Launched in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds, Technology, Entertainment and Design, its scope has since become a lot broader and embraces annual conferences – the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh each summer – plus the TEDx programmes that take TED conferences to a wide range of other countries.
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Tags: Ethiopia, Nigeria, TED
admin December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Disaster Risk Reduction, Drought, EU, Floods, Global warming, Japan, LSE, Mali, Mauritania, natural disasters, Niger, Nigeria, Sahel, Thailand, World Bank
admin December 3rd, 2011
Good news for sub-Saharan Africa – it’s not as corrupt as some other parts of the world according to the latest Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International (TI). Although there’s still quite a lot of work to be done if you have a look at the colourful map on page four of the TI report.
Unlike the recently-published 2011 version of the Human Development Index, in which the bottom places were packed with sub-Saharan African countries – and Afghanistan – there are a mere four African countries in the bottom ten of this global table. Somalia comes equal bottom with North Korea, and the other African countries in the Highly Corrupt group are Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Burundi.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, France, Germany, HDI, Mauritius, New Zealand, North Korea, Portugal, Rwanda, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Transparency International, UK, USA
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
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
admin September 12th, 2011
A new report produced by Eurodad – the European Network on Debt and Development – shows that $69 billion spent on official development aid each year goes straight back to the donor country in the form of contracts for its private sector companies. This is more than half of the total spend on development aid.
This means that companies in the developed countries of the North benefit massively from the aid that their governments are giving to the poorer countries of the South.
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Tags: Eurodad, Trade not Aid
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
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
