AlertNet News Blog

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 Nita Bhalla

In the face of climate change, is it time to re-examine the way we do development in Asia?

For years, many developing countries have believed it can be only one or the other - economic growth or reducing carbon emissions.

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Does the British public see aid for poor, disaster-prone countries as a good cause? Yes. Are they interested in what happens to their money? Yes. Do they know much about it? No.

Those were the main findings of two opinion surveys released in the UK last year by the British Red Cross and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).

IDS cautioned that low awareness about how aid is spent could damage support for the British government's commitment to raise its foreign aid budget.

It's a worry shared on a global scale by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The health and development giant has launched a competition to find innovative ways of communicating to the public in developed nations that aid is working, isn't wasted (in the main), and gets good results for poor people.

The foundation has teamed up with the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which brings together the global advertising and communications industry, in what they describe as "a unique call for action that aims to inspire the world's greatest brand communicators to come up with an idea that will help solve a global problem".

"Communication about development aid has long focused on making the case for its need," says Tom Scott, director of global brand and innovation at the Gates Foundation. "There is a huge opportunity to talk about how it works and what it does – to tell the real success stories that exist."

In fact, you don't have to be an advertising whizz kid to enter the fray – the challenge is open to any individual, team, agency or company.

All you have to do is send in a two-page communications idea for telling the positive stories behind global development aid by May 15.

The submissions will be judged by a jury that includes a group of specially selected top creative executives called Cannes Chimera and members of the Gates Foundation's review board. Up to ten of the best will be selected as finalists, receiving $100,000 each to develop their idea.

The winners will also be flown to Seattle and mentored by the Cannes Chimera experts to hone their projects, with a further opportunity to apply for $1 million to put them into practice.

COMPLEX CHALLENGE

Philip Thomas, Cannes Lions CEO, tells me there's been an enormous amount of interest in the competition from the world's big advertising and design networks.

But they may well need to bring in the relief and development charities they sometimes work with as clients to get the full story on aid, and find beneficiaries who can tell it from their own perspective.

"This is a really complex area," he says, "Most advertising agencies on their own would really struggle to be able to put forward a good case."

Thomas is hoping the competition will throw up some revolutionary ideas, which he believes are likely to be digital and thus able to reach a lot of people.

The web information on the challenge mentions some examples of what the Gates Foundation and Cannes Lions are looking for. They include new ways to collect and share first-person stories from aid recipients; data collection and visualisation that demonstrates where funding goes and its impact; creative distribution mechanisms to deliver stories and other information; and interactive approaches like games and crowdsourcing.

Based on the communications I've seen aid agencies using in the last few years, it seems to me that some of these things are already happening.

The British Red Cross, for example, ran a cutting-edge alternate reality game to introduce people to life in a Ugandan displacement camp through the eyes of a boy called Joseph. And Save the Children did an online multimedia project about its work with the people of Kroo Bay, a slum in Sierra Leone's Freetown, which aimed to link the charity's UK supporters with mothers and children benefiting from the funded activities.

But perhaps efforts so far have been on too small a scale to make a real difference to the wider public's perceptions. And perhaps a competition with more money and the weight of the world's creative industry behind it will be the catalyst needed to change that.

When Cannes Lions' Thomas got the brief from the Gates Foundation, his first reaction was that telling the world aid works is an "extremely difficult" one to crack.

"My second thought was that this is what our industry thrives on – they thrive on being given the most hairy, audacious briefs, because that is what they do for a living," he says. "So why not? Let's just send it out there, and if these guys can't come up with something interesting – and hopefully meaningful – then frankly nobody can." 

For information on how to enter the "Aid is Working. Tell the World" competition, visit the Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Initiative website.

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By William Settle, FAO

West African farmers have succeeded in increasing farm yields and profitability, while reducing the use of toxic pesticides, thanks to a community-driven training scheme run by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Around 150,000 smallholder farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal are participating in the West African Regional Integrated Production and Pest Management (IPPM) Programme. Working in small groups, called Farmer Field Schools, smallholders are developing and adopting good agricultural practices.

The Field Schools are essentially community laboratories in which farmers build new skills and knowledge through discovery-based learning and hands-on field experiments. The training approach - whose motto is“the field is our book” - has been used in around 90 countries across the world, including in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

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The headline in a national newspaper says it all, “Britain’s dirty secret; scandal of the hungry children.” The scandal refers to an estimated 2 million children in Britain suffering from maltreatment including neglect, many of whom are increasingly struggling to get enough to eat. Kids Company reaches over 17,000 vulnerable children, providing loving care and practical support. We’ve just launched our Plate Pledge appeal, driven by the stark facts from research we carried out with children who come to our street level centres; 85 percent of the children told us they depend on us for their main meal of the day, 64 percent told us there’s no food at home and 33 percent said they rely on cheap takeaways. 

We’ve seen self referrals increase to a level of 233 percent from where they were a year ago, mostly because children are coming to our centres saying they are hungry and there’s not enough food at home. Children like David, a 10-year-old boy with lightning fast mental arithmetic developed out of hunger and desperation. At just 10, David does all the shopping and cooking, calculating in his head all the items in his trolley so they don’t come to more than the £20 that he and his disabled Mum have each week for all their food.

He quietly told me how he does all the housework and cares for his wheelchair-bound Mum who suffers from a neurological condition. Other than Kids Company, the only support he receives is from his elderly grandmother whose presence is sporadic. Kids Company is a lifeline for David and his Mum, with daily meals and a Kids Company keyworker and volunteer mentor supporting them. David’s circumstances do not meet the threshold for action from Social Services who are overwhelmed by more severe cases requiring immediate action.

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In January, 2012, Justine MacWilliam, project manager for AmeriCares Health Worker Safety Initiative, traveled to Bugando Medical Centre in Tanzania to see first-hand the remarkable achievements that Bugando’s workers have made in improving hospital safety during the three-year pilot initiative. Here, Justine provides a glimpse of the life-saving culture of change the initiative has created among hospital staff.

"Many of Tanzania's health workers haven’t had adequate training on preventing the spread of hospital-related infections and injury."

Saturday, April 28th, is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, a day to raise awareness about the importance of preventing injury and disease related to workplace hazards. Hospitals everywhere pose workplace hazards, especially in developing countries, where health workers risk their lives each day on the job.

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Killer health problems such as diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria and dengue are highly sensitive to climate change and could worsen in the coming decades, health experts agree. But how, where and to what extent remains unclear.

More than 140,000 lives lost per year - that’s the number of excess deaths global warming since the 1970s was causing by 2004, according to the World Health Organisation.

It’s reasonable to assume the figures could be higher by now.

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“It will take months, perhaps years before health facilities are fully repaired."

While most of the communities I visited received a great deal of support during the response phase, there were plenty of crucial gaps apparent several months after the disasters.

In Joplin, where the damage was well-chronicled, the extent of destruction to the city’s health care infrastructure was shocking. Government funding has been made available to restore some of these facilities, but it will take months, perhaps years before they are fully repaired. What happens to people who need care in the meantime? Two providers in Joplin were able to resume services with the help of our grants – ensuring that uninsured and underinsured children and seniors gain access to medical care over the next 12 months.

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For the last 40 years, Earth Day has been celebrated around the world to call attention to some of our most pressing environmental and social problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and dwindling natural resources. This year, the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet (www.NourishingthePlanet.org) highlights 15 agricultural innovations that are already working on the ground to address some of those problems.

By Mike Shanahan, press officer, International Institute for Environment and Development

Nguyen Viet Nghi’s enthusiasm was infectious as he showed off a scene of remarkable renewal in what was once a disaster zone.

We were in Da Loc commune, a sleepy part of Vietnam’s Thanh Hoa province. It’s a place that on a single day witnessed both the fury and the protective power of nature.

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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 Laurie Goering

In a few months, experts will gather in Rio de Janeiro for a conference aimed at wresting the world onto a more sustainable path – one that doesn’t lead to runaway climate change, widespread shortages of food, water, energy and other resources, or ever greater social and global inequality.

Expectations are low, as you might expect of an effort that aims, among other things, to rewrite economic fundamentals – such as shifting away from GDP growth as the main measure of progress - and to persuade rich people and those billions who aspire to be rich that curbing their consumption – be it holidays abroad or more meat for dinner – is the right thing to do.

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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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By Astrid Zweynert

OXFORD, England  (TrustLaw) – “Education, education, education” was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s mantra when he set out his priorities for office in 1997. But while Blair’s remarks were focused on education in Britain, Gordon Brown has made it his mission to work for improvements in education globally.

Speaking at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship he announced the formation of a new organisation, “Education without Borders” to tackle the issue.

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Recently, I wrote about how aid groups are calling on Washington to get more bang for its food aid bucks, calling for an end to ‘tied’ aid and more local purchasing of relief food.

Today, Oxfam America and American Jewish World Service (AJWS) have put out a report and accompanying infographic arguing that an extra 17.1 million people could receive life-saving food aid at no additional cost to U.S. taxpayers if Congress cuts red-tape in the U.S. Farm Bill, which is now under discussion.

In 2010, Washington spent more than $2 billion on food aid, reaching roughly 65 million people in the process, according to the report.

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By Megan Rowling

Can football succeed where U.N. officials, politicians and aid agencies have, well, not exactly failed, but had a somewhat limited impact?

From March 30 to April 2, the “Professional Football Against Hunger" campaign will play out in hundreds of European football stadiums, spreading the message through national league matches that action is needed now to avert a hunger disaster in Africa’s Sahel region.

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Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy describes the impact of the February 22 shelling of the Baba Amr district in the Syrian city of Homs. Conroy escaped after suffering leg injuries.

The bombardment killed U.S. journalist Marie Colvin, French photographer Remi Ochlik and seriously injured French journalist Edith Bouvier.

Conroy spoke at an event hosted by the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW) on Tuesday in London.

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Tom Mitchell is head of climate change at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and one of the authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on managing the risks of extreme events and disasters (SREX)

This week record-breaking temperatures and lack of rain likely herald a summer of drought in Britain, but a major new report from more than 200 scientists suggests that hosepipe bans could be the least of our problems over the coming decades.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has analysed extreme weather events and concludes that the number and frequency of such disasters is going to increase. And the world will not be able to cope. If we do not want to live in a never-ending disaster movie, we need to get serious about linking our carbon consumption to the changing weather map.

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By Samuel Nota

Today, the silver screen version of the popular book series The Hunger Games debuted to considerable fanfare. But while a starving society is portrayed in the movie as a piece of dystopian fiction, The Hunger Games highlights a very concerning reality: about 1 billion people around the world are hungry and fight on a daily basis for some sense of food security.

The aid group Tearfund has used The Hunger Games’ box office popularity to launch an education campaign about the daily “hunger game” that leaves 1 in 7 people in the world going to bed hungry. The truth, they argue, is that The Hunger Games’ dystopian setting is not pure fiction.

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By Katie Harris and Frauke Urban

Disasters are nothing new, but the more they occur the better prepared we should be. The more we learn about the way natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and their exposure to those hazards inter-relate, the more we learn about how to become ‘disaster resilient’.

Yet being ‘resilient’ is not just about being able to thrive in spite of a one-off crisis, but to be able to withstand and progress in spite of what can be numerous, interlinked events – as the recent anniversary of the March 2011 Japan earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima reminds us.

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By Megan Rowling

Here in Marseille, aid groups like Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger - ACF) are patting themselves on the back for pushing water-related humanitarian emergencies higher up the political agenda, saying they've made it to the heart of World Water Forum discussions for the first time.

They were mentioned as a priority in the Forum’s ministerial declaration and tackled in a big discussion on water and disasters.

The expert panel highlighted the rise in the frequency and intensity of floods and droughts, as well as the challenges of providing access to clean water and hygiene after a disaster.

Kristalina Georgieva, the European commissioner for aid and emergency response, said water and sanitation needs are soaking up a growing share of humanitarian funding - not least because floods and droughts often end up compounding existing water and hygiene deprivation for the poorest.

"One of the consequences in a disaster is that communities that didn't have much access to safe water, and especially sanitation, to begin with... have even less," she said.

"For the humanitarian community what it means is that, over the last decade, we have seen a 30-times increase in funding... to provide safe water and sanitation,” she added.

“And even with this increase, we don't quite manage to meet the needs."

ACF President Benoît Miribel agreed that "disasters are happening where there is already a disaster", whether it's a scarcity of water or bad sanitation, leaving some countries and communities in "a permanent state of disaster".

Another issue that is often neglected in crisis situations is the disposal and treatment of wastewater, Miribel said.

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By Megan Rowling

From corporate involvement in water provision to ministerial wording around the right to water, and standards for building large dams, many activists are far from happy with what’s happening at the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille this week.

Ahead of the huge triennial gathering, expected to attract up to 25,000 participants from some 180 countries, several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) raised the alarm that a draft declaration to be issued by ministers did not contain an unequivocal commitment to the U.N.-recognised rights to water and sanitation.

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At first sight the Azuma Nursery school in Fukushima city appears like any other Japanese nursery school; immaculately clean, well organised with happy children looked after by smiling attentive carers. But appearances are deceptive. The turf in the school playground has been ripped up, and a large solar powered radiation monitor now stands by the disused climbing frame.  Since the disaster at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor one year ago, most of the children here have spent most of their year indoors due to fears surrounding the possible health effects of radiation levels which are monitored on an hourly basis.  According to a government guideline, if the radiation monitor reads between 0 -1 microsieverts per hour it’s considered safe for children to play outside for one hour. Today the reading is 0.191, yet most mothers are still reluctant to let their children outside.

The Fukushima disaster has changed people’s lives here irrevocably. The school Principal, Sumiko Nanashima feels that while the children understand why they can’t play outside, it’s their mothers who are bearing the most stress with the constant worry about their children’s welfare. I have a chance to speak with a group of the mothers, all of who are very vocal. Emiko Goto, clearly feels aggrieved that so much attention has been paid to people who had to evacuate from their homes within the exclusion zone and not on the welfare of residents of Fukushima city who are also suffering.

“Sometimes we don’t know what to believe. The government says one thing then the media write stories exaggerating the situation. You can’t decide what to do with all the different information coming out about the radiation,” she says.

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At 2.46 pm precisely, the early warning sirens echoed around coastal towns and hamlets all along Japan’s North-East coast as people observed one minutes silence to remember those who died in Japan’s worst disaster in living memory. This was the moment when the magnitude 9 earthquake triggered a tsunami that claimed almost 19,000 lives and devastated 500 square kilometres of Japan’s coastline.

I spend the day in Kesennuma, one of the worst hit towns in Myagi prefecture. Over 1000 died here as the tsunami surged through the city, taking everything in its path. I remember the amateur video footage of the flaming islands of debris floating through the city, lighting up the night sky. Despite all the water, fires were everywhere as the fuel from overturned fishing boats ignited. It was a horrific scene.

Now Kesennuma is largely a ghost town. The debris of splintered houses and mangled cars has been piled into heaps near the sea front, a constant reminder of nature’s destructive force. The city centre is now a windswept landscape comprised of a grid of foundations, the only reminder of the homes and shops that used to stand here.

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This year’s International Women’s Day focuses on empowering rural women. As we know only too well water, improved hygiene and sanitation are key to women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation.

Women spend a staggering 40 billion working hours every year collecting water – valuable hours lost that could be spent earning a living or looking after their families. Walking to collect water and carrying heavy loads usually falls to women and girls, reinforcing gender inequalities in employment and education. As we see so often, the lack of basic water and sanitation services means lost opportunities for girls in gaining an education – so critical for girls’ empowerment.

Women are at the heart of everything WaterAid does. We all know how access to clean water and sanitation transforms the lives of women and girls, impacting on wider development. It gets girls back into school, women into employment, and improves health, dignity, wellbeing and independence.

We have been making some great progress, not only in meeting women’s immediate needs for clean water, safe toilets and improved hygiene, but also by championing their voices and their leadership. By involvement in project design and community decision making we see women become powerful advocates holding local service providers to account.

Seeing women take their power and challenge the gender stereotypes is always so inspirational. I have so much enjoyed meeting some of the wonderful skilled women water mechanics who have shown that they can take their place alongside the men.

The great news this week was that the world has met its target to halve the number of people living without access to clean water. This really shows what can be done with the right political will and investment.  However, there are still 783 million people being denied this human right, and 2.5 billion people still lack access to an adequate toilet. As a result, millions of women remain trapped in cycles of poverty and inequality.

WaterAid is committed to a world where everyone has access to safe water and sanitation – critical to this vision being realised will be a world where women can realise their full potential.

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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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By Megan Rowling

One common argument in favour of boosting aid to struggling small farmers is that they didn't get much of it during the 1990s and the first few years of the 21st century.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that the share of official development assistance (ODA) going to agriculture, forestry and fishing peaked at a record high of 20 percent in 1979 before steadily declining to a record low of 3.7 percent in 2006.

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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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Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell are founding directors of the Center for Climate and Security.

Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime and a response to the political wave of change that began in Tunisia early last year. However, that’s not the whole story.

The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government in the country, have strengthened the case for the opposition movement, and irreparably damaged the legitimacy of the al-Assad regime. If the international community, and future policy-makers in Syria, are to address and resolve the drivers of unrest in the country, these changes will have to be better explored and exposed.

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During the initial stages of a conflict or natural disaster, those who are forced to flee are particularly at risk—women, children and young people most of all.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has identified 10 pressing needs that must be met during the first weeks and months of an emergency to ensure the safety and well-being of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs)*. Some 43 million people are currently uprooted from their homes by armed conflict and persecution.

1. Keep refugees and IDPs safe. Ensure that they are settled in a secure location away from borders and ongoing conflict.
2. Provide safe access to basic needs, including food, safe and appropriate cooking fuel, potable water, sanitation and shelter.
3. Communicate with the people most affected and ensure their safety whether or not they have legal status or official documents. Ensure every adult is provided with individual documentation that allows him or her to access key services.
4. Provide life-saving health care, including reproductive health care. Ensure there are enough health workers and all necessary medicines and supplies to prevent and respond to infectious diseases and other health needs. Establish priority reproductive health services for women and girls.
5. Prevent and respond to sexual violence. Protect women and children from sexual violence by ensuring safe access to food, cooking fuel, water, latrines and other basic necessities. Offer medical services and psychosocial support to survivors of sexual violence.
6. Reduce the transmission of HIV. Enforce use of infection control measures by health workers; make condoms freely available; and ensure blood for transfusion is safe by screening it for HIV and other blood-borne diseases.
7. Prevent excess maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. Provide skilled birth attendants for normal births; manage obstetric complications at health facilities; establish 24-hour emergency referral system; provide contraceptives to meet demands; provide clean delivery kits to all visibly pregnant women.
8. Identify vulnerable individuals with specific needs, such as unaccompanied minors, child- or women-headed households, pregnant women, victims of trafficking and persons with disabilities. Secure their care and physical security. Monitor, report and respond to violations against children.
9. Provide education to children and young people. Offer structure for children and restore hope and a sense of normalcy in a safe, adult-supervised space. Teach basic literacy and numeracy skills, and provide vocational training for young people.
10. Provide economic opportunities and preserve existing economic assets. Build on refugees’ skills, taking into account local market needs, to provide the best chance for a sustainable income. Protect women and girls from sexual exploitation by providing them with economic opportunities.

* A refugee has crossed an international border; an internally displaced person (IDP) has fled from his or her home but is still in his or her own country.

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