Emergency responses are failing on three counts. They fail to prevent the recurrence of crisis. They fail to support the capacity of the pastoral community to withstand the effects of shocks. And they fail to adapt to the changing nature of shocks. There is an urgent need to develop responses that address the underlying causes of the increasing vulnerability facing agro-based livelihoods (livestock and farming). Equally important are developmental responses to enable poor households to pursue productive economic alternatives.Download the paper from the HPN website.
Twitter has gone mainstream, with Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher each racking up over a million followers. Critics have panned the microblogging site as narcissistic at best, but media-savvy people around the world have adopted Twitter for far more serious purposes. Moldovans used Twitter to organize protests against fraudulent elections, witnesses to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai kept the world updated via Twitter, and citizens in Myanmar used Twitter to circumvent media censorship and report on the true severity of last year’s deadly cyclone.
Humanitarian relief workers in particular have taken to Twitter’s short messaging technology. Its 140 character limit and ability to reach multiple people simultaneously have proved extremely useful for communicating in rapidly-evolving situations.
Read more on the PBS website.
A detailed study of the effects of climate change on Mozambique has confirmed what many experts feared: unless immediate action is taken, the country will be overwhelmed by the impacts of cyclones, floods, droughts and disease outbreaks.Read more on IRIN.
"I am alarmed by many of the findings presented in this study," said Ndolam Ngokwe, the UN resident coordinator in Mozambique, at the launch of the INGC Climate Change Report by Mozambique's National Disaster Management Institute (INGC) in the capital, Maputo, on 25 June. ...
Mozambique, already more frequently and severely affected by natural disasters than virtually any other country in Africa, would have to adapt to a changing reality, Ngokwe warned.
The study combined historical climate data from various Mozambican weather stations with global climate projections, and together with anticipated socio-economic developments, developed scenarios and identified adaptation measures for reducing vulnerability.
..."The exposure to natural disaster risk in Mozambique will increase significantly over the coming 20 years and beyond," the report noted. In the event of poor global mitigation results - the "too little, too late" scenario - temperatures in Mozambique could rise by as much as two degrees Celsius to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, and by 5 degrees Celsius to 6 degrees Celsius by 2090.
Rainfall variability would increase, the start of the rainy season would likely shift, flood risk would be higher, and the centre of the country would suffer more intense cyclones and droughts.
How to help the poor have more money? Well, you could give it to them.
In 2007, people in the Western Province of Zambia lost their homes, their livestock and their crops when heavier-than-normal flash floods swept through their area. USAID’s office of disaster assistance stepped in with $280,000 worth of with seeds and fertilizer, training for farmers, and emergency relief supplies.
Two NGOs working in Zambia, Oxfam GB and Concern Worldwide, tried a different approach: they handed out envelopes stuffed with cash—from $25 to $50 per month per affected family, with no strings attached. An evaluation found that common fears about cash transfers—that the cash infusion will cause inflation in the market, that the money will be squandered, or that men will take control of the money—were unrealized.
What did people buy with the money? The list includes maize, beans, salt, cooking oil, meat, vegetables, clothes and blankets, paraffin, transport, soap and body lotion, and lots of other mundane household items. They also loaned it to friends, used it to pay back debts, purchased health care, education and transport, and rebuilt their homes. Only a very small fraction of the money (less than .5%) was spent on “unproductive” items, like liquor for the men.
The 2008 Humanitarian Accountability Report was launched during the 7th HAP General Assembly on the 5 - 6 May in Geneva; IRIN report a 'systemic shift' to focus on accountability although 'problems remain in transparency about interventions, communication with aid recipients, monitoring and reporting on sexual abuse and eliminating corruption'.
The Report opens with John Borton's, An Overview of Humanitarian Accountability in 2008, highlighting the principle developments and accountability trends across the humanitarian sector throughout the year; and includes the results of the fourth annual Survey of Perceptions of Humanitarian Accountability; a chapter on the Voices of disaster survivors; HAP Members' Accountability Workplan Implementation Reports and the HAP Secretariat's Annual Report.
Read more and order a copy on the HAP website.
An 8 month evaluation of the strategy to consider persons of diverse age, gender and physical condition in planning and program (Age, Gender, Diversity Mainstreaming or AGDM) for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) begins this week [late March 2009]. In this video independent evaluators Virginia Thomas and Tony Beck join Naoko Obi, head of UNHCR’s Community Development, Gender Equality and Children Section, to discuss the mission, methodology and milestones for this comprehensive task.
People in the Arid and Semi Arid Lands of the Horn and East Africa have adapted over the ages to hot and dry conditions. Living as pastoralists, they keep livestock in ways that take advantage of production and follow a natural cycle of rangeland and water use. Today pastoralism makes a significant contribution to the income of many Horn and East African countries and contributes to the livelihoods of many millions of people. However, recurrent droughts, limited access to land and restrictive policies are stretching pastoralists' ability to cope. Many of the less fortunate have fallen into destitution and poverty.Use the links below to access the individual papers:
Governments and international agencies have yet to find effective solutions to the natural and political vulnerabilities of these communities in ways that respect the complexity of pastoral livelihoods. What is more, the short-term focus of their responses has failed to address the underlying causes of problems – in some cases, compounding them.
This set of Synthesis Papers presents analysis and recommendations on a range of issues affecting pastoralists in the Horn and East Africa. They will be launched at a major regional symposium in Nairobi, Kenya today (May 15th) with follow up events and seminars in Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia in the coming months.
YOUR TURN TO ASK: Reducing risk in a world of disasters
11 May 2009 15:36:00 GMT
Written by: AlertNet
This Sunday, the United Nations will be launching an important new report looking at how, where and why disaster risk is increasing globally.
Drawing on more than 30 years of data, the study will analyse how climate change and other factors are changing the map of vulnerability. It will also come up with key recommendations for making the planet safer.
The contents of the report are under lock and key until the May 17 launch in Bahrain. But AlertNet has asked the United Nations' top official on disaster risk reduction to field questions from readers ahead of the event.
Margareta Wahlstrom, chief of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, will answer your burning questions about climate change, vulnerability and the risks faced by developing countries. You can participate by using the comments section below or by using the #askmw tag on Twitter.
We'll get as many of your questions to Wahlstrom as possible, and we'll be publishing her replies on AlertNet on Friday, so keep checking back!
New to Twitter? If you aren't using Twitter already but want to post a question or see what other people are asking Wahlstrom through Twitter, just get yourself a Twitter account, search for the #askmw tag and view all questions. You can post a 140-character question yourself, making sure to use the #askmw tag somewhere in your post so it sits with all the other posts from people across the Twittersphere.
Read the issue online at the HPN website.This edition of Humanitarian Exchange focuses on the global food price crisis of 2007 and 2008. The sharp rise in food prices was mainly caused by a combination of reduced cereal stocks, increased demand and the rising price of oil, increasing the cost of fertiliser and stimulating the production of biofuels in the US. By 2008, the number of hungry people in the world had increased to over 1 billion, up from 850 million in early 2007. Populations already affected by crisis were hardest hit. While globally the price of cereals has decreased, it remains high in many of these countries.
Articles in this issue explore the extent, scale and impact of the global food crisis on vulnerable populations, particularly city-dwellers – a neglected group in humanitarian response – subsistence farmers and pastoralists.
I seem stuck in a spiral of interviews, half-meetings on stairways and in the backs of cars, rare trips to the storm-hit locations on the edge of battered Yangon, late-night beers in a weirdly well-functioning hotel.Read more on Head Down Eyes Open.
So much is happening, but the story is the paucity of aid. Our relief planes arrive one by one, then four in one day. The Myanmar Red Cross HQ by the port in Yangon is frenetic from dawn to dusk with hundreds of volunteers loading relief supplies onto trucks.
The expulsion of 12 foreign aid agencies and one private development firm and the suspension of three national NGOs by the Sudanese government following the issuing of an international arrest warrant for President Bashir has generated widespread concerns about the potential impact of an interruption of aid on civilians at risk. These concerns have, though, been largely limited to Darfur. Worryingly, very little attention has been focused on the repercussions these expulsions could have on the Three Areas (Abyei, Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile) and the eastern region which have only recently emerged from conflict and remain highly volatile.Read more on Alertnet.
“We’ve come a long way,” says Colm Byrne, of the Irish Red Cross, describing his organisation’s innovative communications project in Indonesia.
Following the tsunami there was an emphasis on communication going back to donors and external media, but there was room to improve the accountability and transparency to beneficiaries.
“We quickly realised we could do something. It started with a radio programme and soon evolved into a more complex mix of communication approaches including personal interaction with Red Cross volunteers playing a key role too,” explains Byrne.
The resulting project has gone from strength to strength, says Byrne.
But the lack of attention paid to communications in the planning stages of humanitarian response is a story familiar to many in the international aid community.
Read more on the British Red Cross website.
'...it is really Simon’s unerring commitment to push high quality evidence and debate into the heart of international policy processes that has become his leitmotif. Under his leadership, ODI has not only built an extensive and respected network of partners in both developing and developed countries, it has also become the first port of call for evidence-based policy research on a host of critical development and humanitarian issues. What ODI says is heard, loud and clear, by those who need to listen, and that is a crucial part of Simon’s legacy.'Read more on the ODI blog.
Read more on the New York Times website.The cyclone that struck on the night of May 2 last year was one of the deadliest storms in recorded history. It blew away 700,000 homes in the delta. It killed three-fourths of the livestock, sank half the fishing fleet and salted a million acres of rice paddies with its seawater surges.
In many ways, just a year beyond those horrors, life in the Irrawaddy Delta has settled back into some of its familiar rhythms, the push of the planting and the pull of the harvest. It is a manageable if hardscrabble life, one that the weather controls and the farmers expect.
But something unexpected has happened, too, say U.N. officials, aid workers and foreign diplomats in Myanmar. The storm — and a following surge of humanitarian aid — might have opened a breach in the political wall around Myanmar...
