Africa Views

Children run and play as the skies above Leer airstrip in Unity State of South Sudan rumble. The clouds swell, it slowly gets grey and the sun retreats. Many children in the conflict prone border areas would not sing for the rain to go away. Roads drink the rains and get overly soggy and impassable, which helps quiet the drums of war. In these places it rains peace.

As the children play they remain oblivious of the growing number of people in their small haven of peace that is taking in humanitarian workers and other community members from neighbouring counties like Bentiu, that have suffered aerial bombardments in the last couple of weeks.

“We were having morning prayers on Tuesday (April 24) when we heard the sound of planes, then a lot of gun fire and blasts. It was clear that Bentiu was under attack,” recalls Moses Ntambara World Vision’s Commodity Officer for Unity State an area that is currently highly vulnerable.

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By Emma Batha

The United Nations recently declared the world had met an ambitious target for halving the number of people without safe drinking water well ahead of a 2015 deadline.

It’s an impressive achievement, but not necessarily as impressive as it sounds.

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By Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia

The world is suddenly paying attention to the oft-ignored North African country of Mali, as it is racked by its most recent in a long string of crises: a coup d’etat.

This political and constitutional crisis sits atop an already extremely vulnerable situation - a volatile mix of climate change, drought, food shortages, migration and immobility, armed insurrection and heavy weapons proliferation that threaten to plunge the country into a state of instability not unlike Somalia.

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By Mairi Dupar

Have you heard of anyone going to court to obtain protection from climate change impacts? Or to sue a company for causing climate-related harm?

Individuals, communities and even whole nations are increasingly exploring these possibilities, broadly termed ‘climate change litigation’.

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By Rodrigo Ordóñez

Having less food during the months leading to harvest is not new for people of Niger and other countries in the Sahel region. However, this year they are bracing for something harsher than what they are used to, as drought, soaring food prices, and regional insecurity are adding additional stress.

CARE is providing income to families like Tchima’s so they can buy food ahead of what is commonly known as the ‘lean season,’ the gap between the time people run out of food stocks and the next harvest. People receive cash in exchange for part-time work in projects identified by their communities, or as a handout in the cases of families where nobody is able to perform manual labor.

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The Etawantaw family live in Tin’Akoff, a village in the far north-east of Burkina Faso, five kilometres from the border with Mali. This region is known as the Sahel. It is dry and dusty for most of the year. As it is hard to grow food, most people who live here are pastoralists, raising cattle, goats and sheep. The region is plagued by regular droughts. In 2011, the rains failed again. As a result harvests were lost and there is a major food shortage for both people and livestock. People in this region mainly eat millet, sorghum and meat.

Tahya has five daughters. She and her husband used to have 50 cows and goats. They lost many of their animals over the last five years due to drought and sickness. The rest they have had to sell to buy food to survive. This year they have no animals left to sell and no form of income to buy food.

“To be able to provide for my children, I have to go out and beg for food from others. Or I depend on my neighbours for food. If the children don’t eat at the neighbours, they eat nothing.”

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By Zoe Cormier,, Centre for International Forestry Research

Wild animals such as bonobos and large antelopes are being unsustainably hunted to meet overwhelming domestic demand for bushmeat. This is having serious impacts on both species diversity and rural forest communities who depend on wild sources of meat for up to 80% of the protein in their diets.

Scientists at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) are encouraging Africa’s city dwellers to stop the consumption of protected species and consume sustainable sources of meat, whether from domestic animals or from resilient species that are hunted in a sustainable way.

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By Christie Peacock, Sidai Africa

Livestock are kept by most farming families in Africa and are often the family’s main asset, source of protein as well as a means of making money. For very poor families the income they earn from their livestock can help to lift them out of poverty. It is therefore crucial that farmers are able to protect their livestock against life-threatening diseases, as well as having access to good advice and the inputs they need to improve the production and marketability of their stock.

Historically in Africa veterinary services were provided free of charge by government veterinary staff.  However this all changed in the 1990’s when these subsidies were withdrawn and government staff numbers cut back. A small private sector emerged with qualified vets and livestock technicians setting up shops to sell drugs and other inputs and offer basic clinical services. However this emerging private sector remains focused on selling products to the more accessible market-orientated smallholder dairy and poultry farmers. Likewise most commercial suppliers of drugs, feeds or semen for artificial insemination also focus on the higher potential farming areas leaving most livestock keepers poorly served or not served at all.

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The Lower Eastern part of Kenya, locally referred to as Ukambani, has over the years been known for perennial droughts and crop failure. In this era of climate change, weather patterns have become most unpredictable and Ukambani is among the regions that have been hardest hit.

Indeed, as has become routine, out of ten seasons of rain, only one season yields enough rainfall to sustain meaningful agriculture in most parts of this region. For this reason, crop failure in the region has become inevitable, leading to high levels of poverty and food insecurity among communities, due to families’ low economic power.

Many families in Ukambani have been recipients of relief food from Kenya Red Cross Society, the Government and other organisations for very many years. Unfortunately, relief food distribution is not sustainable and further, it is a temporary measure that does not empower communities towards food security. It is also demoralising for a family to be reliant on food aid year in, year out.

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By Krista Zimmerman, Lutheran World Relief

Bakina Zacharia is a woman farmer who lives in remote Idole Village in Dodoma, Tanzania. Dry climate and unpredictable rainfall make farming challenging, but there are few other livelihoods options.

Like many farmers in the region, Bakina grows onions, a popular crop. And in the past, she struggled to make enough money to provide for her family.  Like the farmers around her, she used to harvest her crop in the fall and sell them right away.  Because all the farmers sold at once, the market was flooded and prices were low.

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By World Vision

Sometimes innovative thinking means using traditions that work well already in Africa. The Zai technique is an example.

Zai is a traditional African planting technique used in Burkina Faso, which helps revitalize the soil in dry climates.

To do it, farmers dig small, shallow pits, then fill them with a small amount of organic fertilising material like animal dung.  At the bottom of the pits farmers place about two handfuls of organic material, such as animal dung or crop residues. Pearl millet or sorghum seeds are planted in these pits as soon as the rainfall starts.

The holes ensure that the precious water and fertiliser stay near the plant where they’re needed, and don’t get spread throughout the field.

The poorly available organic matter is placed at the bottom of the pit and not spread over the whole field.

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Before you arrive at the Portomani village kitchen in Quthing, not only can you smell the vegetables being cooked and prepared for preservation you can also hear the sound of the cooks singing songs about how their lives have changed thanks to the Red Cross.

Quthing in the south eastern district of Lesotho has a population of 100,000 (check). In the past it has been struggling to cope with the spread of HIV/AIDs and TB and the changing weather conditions from drought, heavy rainfall and even snow – all of which prevent the land producing crops. These combined forces of diseases and inhospitable climate make it almost impossible for the vulnerable people in the community to survive.

However, the community kitchen has become a sign of hope for the local people. Silvia Nkuebe, a 35 year old Red Cross Food Security Project Officer has been part of the Integrated Home Based Care and Food Security Programme, which aims to build resilience to HIV and food insecurity for the most vulnerable people in the four districts of Lesotho.

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By World Vision

What is weather insurance?

Weather insurance protects small-scale farmers from the unpredictable hazards that impact successful harvests. The official name for this coverage scheme is the Weather-Index Crop Insurance plan. The pilot-project, pioneered by World Vision in Tanzania’s northeast, gives small-scale farmers access to insurance that will cover their crops in case of drought or climate change.

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By Elisabeth Anderson Rapport, Action Against Hunger

For 29-year-old Congolese mother Bitondo Patience, malnutrition was a silent threat that attacked her daughter without obvious indicators. Her four-year-old, Wabiwa, showed signs of illness — vomiting, lack of appetite and a temperature — but just what afflicted her was a mystery to
Bitondo.

It wasn’t until her little girl’s feet started to swell that Bitondo got scared. Two weeks after Wabiwa got sick, Botindo took her to see a traditional healer, but she didn’t improve.

But when volunteer health screeners supervised by ACF came to Bitondo and Wabiwa’s home village of Kalama, things changed quickly and for the better. Wabiwa’s swollen feet helped screeners make a quick diagnosis of malnutrition, and take her for free treatment at a health centre in Kilambwigali.

ACF, in collaboration with the Congolese Ministry of Health, provides such screenings in abundance in D.R. Congo, a nation reeling from decades of conflict and neglect. The organisation has developed a robust relationship with the Ministry of Health to strengthen the capacity of D.R. Congo’s health system in tackling child malnutrition by combining direct interventions with technical and logistical support for local health actors.

This collaboration with the Ministry of Health has resulted in highly successful innovations that have enabled the government to deploy medical resources, technical know-how and nutritional support across its vast territory in response to deadly outbreaks of malnutrition.

The goal is not to create a parallel health system within the Congolese one, but to integrate malnutrition within existing systems and resources to ensure sustainable solutions to child malnutrition in the country.

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By Nikke Massie, Lutheran World Relief

Maimouna Bore is a farmer in the Segou Region of Mali who grows a traditional crop called fonio.

Although once out of fashion, Malian farmers are beginning to show renewed interest in fonio. It is a small and very robust grass that is easy to grow, especially in poor soils, and is resistant to both drought and periods of heavy rain.  It is an excellent source of protein, safe for diabetic consumption and matures quickly, providing a much needed food source while other crops are still in the ground.

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By Kathleen Mogelgaard

Small talk about the weather with my Malawian taxi driver became serious very quickly. “We no longer know when the rains are coming,” he said as we bumped along the road toward the Lilongwe airport last November. “It is very difficult, because we don’t know when to plant.”

These days, he is grateful for his job driving a taxi. His extended family and friends are among the 85 percent of Malawians employed in agriculture, much of which is small-holder, rain-fed subsistence farming. Weather-related farming challenges contribute to ongoing food insecurity in Malawi, where one in five children is undernourished.

His observations of the recent changes in climate match forecasts for the region: in East Africa, climate change is expected to reduce the productivity of maize – Malawi’s main subsistence crop – by more than 20 percent by 2030, according to a recent analysis by Oxfam International.

I looked out the window at dusty fields and tried to imagine what Malawi might look like in 2030. For one thing, it will be more crowded. A lot more crowded. According to UN population projections, by 2030, Malawi’s population will have grown from about 15 million today to somewhere between 26.9 and 28.4 million.

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By Daniel Yeo

DFID-funded work by the British Geological Society has revealed that there are huge amounts of groundwater available in Africa – 100 times the amount found on the surface.

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As Mali tries to restore order after the recent coup, a key challenge for the interim civilian government will be getting aid to people as the country verges on a humanitarian disaster.

Dioncounda Traore took over as Mali's interim president on Thursday after leaders of a March 22 coup agreed to return power to civilians. Nearly 80 percent of Malian territory comprising the northern regions of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal is under the control of a mix of Tuareg-led rebels, who have declared an independent state in the north, and armed Islamic groups.

Aid agencies say about 100,000 internally displaced people urgently need assistance including shelter. Residents of some northern towns say they are trapped without food, water, electricity, money and medical care.

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By Samuel Nota

The speed, scale, and complexity of urbanisation are unprecedented, and how we approach it will be fundamental to whether the world achieves environmentally sustainable development, experts said at the recent Planet Under Pressure conference in London.

The modern era of urbanisation since the Industrial Revolution over a century ago has seen the development of megacities around the world. As the world population increases to an estimated 9 billion by 2050, urban centres – particularly small and medium-sized cities - will see a population explosion, the experts said.

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By Julie Mollins

Jonathan Smith is trying to fight disease with facts, figures and – emotion.

Smith is using data-driven research as the basis for a documentary film he hopes will raise awareness about the plight of migrant workers in South African gold mines who, according to a 2011 report published in the American Journal of Public Health, contract tuberculosis (TB) at a rate 10 times higher than the populations from which they come.

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Seth Berkley is chief executive of Gavi Alliance. The views expressed are his own.

Running a health system with Mozambique’s staggering level of disease burden would challenge even the world’s richest nations. An estimated 13 percent of under-five deaths are caused by pneumonia, there are very high levels of malaria, and HIV creates another crushing burden with prevalence rates of more than 30 percent in some areas with resultant tuberculosis epidemics.

Yet Mozambique is not only one of the world’s poorest countries. Its poverty is compounded by the lasting impact of a 16-year civil war (1977-92) that severely disrupted health services, and recurrent floods that continue to undermine a fragile network of health centres.

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By Lorenzo Cotula

"Land grabs" are now one of the biggest issues in Africa.

Over the past few years, companies and foreign governments have been leasing large areas of land in some of Africa's poorest countries.

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By Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell

Libya Hurra. Free Libya. This was one of the main rallying cries last year for the Libyan opposition, which with NATO assistance toppled the brutal 40-year reign of Muammar Gaddafi.

But four and a half months after Gaddafi’s downfall, Libya, under the leadership of the interim National Transitional Council (NTC), is facing the problem of reconciling the many different “free Libyas” envisioned by different publics, and addressing allegations of some “not-so-free” practices.

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By Samuel Nota

Up above the current stars of Twitter, nestled neatly in spots usually reserved for Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Peyton Manning, was an unusual interloper on Wednesday – Joseph Kony, the leader of the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda.

Top hashtags for the day included “#stopkony”, “#makehimfamous”, “#LRA”, “#Invisible Children”, and “#Uganda” – all of them tied to a new viral video by a social-media-savvy group of documentary filmmakers who go by the name Invisible Children, and who want to make Kony famous, in a bad way.

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You travel through the countryside in Mali, heading to Tominian district – about 400 kilometres away from the capital of Bamako, towards the border with Burkina Faso. You have six to seven hours to take in the world unfolding around you. The baobab trees with tortured branches; the mango trees – leaves heavy under the dust – guarding the roads; the empty, yellow or grayish fields, thirsty for water. ‘If we only had water, we could grow vegetables, crops here….But in places like this, you would have to dig 12-13 meters to get to some. And even then, you might not find any,’ comments Abraham, our driver, as if reading your thoughts.

You pass by markets stalls – shabby wooden benches and tables surrounded by shaky poles covered with hay roofs. Outside and not far from Bamako, you can see a palette of vegetables and fruits – melons, bananas, tomatoes, lettuce, oranges, apples, peanuts, baobab fruits – but as you drive further, deeper in the countryside, they become scarce – mainly baobab fruits or powder, and peanuts. Occasionally, you catch glimpses of a butcher, with one slab of goat meat hanging in the dusty, hot air. You can almost feel the dust in your eyes, in your throat, and you look away, ahead of you.

You ask Abraham what life is like where he lives and works, in Kolokani (60 kilometres North-West of Bamako). ‘Lot of the families there have nothing to eat,’ he says, adding that in many villages you can only see now women and children as the men have left, desperate to find work somewhere else to help their families. ‘How do people cope in the meanwhile?’ you probe. ‘Solidarity,’ he answers simply. ‘People help each other in these times. And as things get worse, we start selling our animals. The small ones go first – chickens, for example, then gradually the larger ones – the oxen, the donkeys.’

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Kristalina Georgieva is The Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response  of European Commission

I am just back from Brazzaville, where I walked through the ruins of Mpila. This was the densely populated neighbourhood which took the brunt of the massive explosions which rocked the Congolese Republic’s capital on Sunday.

The scenes of devastation were dramatic. Houses had collapsed like decks of cards, destroying everything and everybody within. People were gathering up what personal belongings they could salvage.

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DAKAR (AlertNet) – Fighting in Mali between the army and rebels, the Nigerian military’s attempts to crack down on a sect that has perpetrated violence in the country’s north, and a rebellion that toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year reign in Libya.

What have these security issues got to do with food insecurity in neighbouring country Niger?

Aid groups say the fallout from instability in these countries has compounded Niger’s food insecurity and fuelled unemployment and poverty in a country where the U.N. estimates 6.1 million people are at risk of starvation.

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By Kathleen Mogelgaard

In January, the U.S. Agency for International Development released its long-awaited climate change strategy. Climate Change & Development: Clean Resilient Growth provides a blueprint for addressing climate change through development assistance programs and operations.

In addition to objectives around mitigation and adaptation, the strategy also outlines a third objective: improving overall operational integration.

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By Ambassador Marlene Moses

The outcome of the international climate change conference last year in Durban, South Africa, underscored a dichotomy that has come to characterise the effort to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions responsible for global warming: While it surpassed what many thought was politically feasible, it was far less than what is needed to avoid a catastrophe.

The “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action,” as the agreement is formally known, gave the talks a boost by setting the world on track to reach a comprehensive climate treaty in 2015. The catch, however, is that any new reduction commitments wouldn’t take effect until 2020 - not nearly soon enough to avoid widespread droughts, food shortages, rising seas, and other devastating climate impacts.

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Sir John Holmes is Director of the Ditchley Foundation, a Trustee of the International Rescue Committee UK and a former UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs

Amid the hustle and bustle of Nairobi’s traffic-choked neighbourhoods, the rumble of the country’s tanks rolling into Somalia hundreds of miles away may only be a faint echo. But for the tens of thousands of Somali refugees trying to scrape a living in the city, Kenya’s military offensive against the Al-Shabaab rebel group across its troubled border holds the threat of more immediate and serious consequences.

For Nairobi’s estimated 120,000 refugees, most of them Somali, life is hard enough at the best of times. The vibrant city offers them freedom of movement and opportunities to make a living independently that are unthinkable for refugees living in camps. But they also face a host of challenges. Reluctant as many are to come forward for fear of being deported or sent to camps, they often lack the necessary documentation to find regular employment or access basic services such as health care and education. Police harassment can be a serious problem, with officers extorting money and locking up those who cannot or will not pay

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