Posts tagged Africa
Just Good Music for the Summer
Is it possible to make a list of albums everyone can agree on? All summer-long, we’ve posted one survey per week where you tell us the albums you love, hate or haven’t really heard. But now we have a running Spotify playlist of songs from (almost) every album that’s been nominated. Give a listen and vote.
Food wasted by consumers in high-income countries (222 million tons) is roughly equal to the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons).
Read more HERE about famine in Africa and the early warning system the US is helping to promote HERE.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) is a USAID-funded activity that collaborates with international, regional and national partners to provide timely and rigorous early warning and vulnerability information on emerging and evolving food security issues. FEWS NET professionals in the Africa, Central America, Haiti, Afghanistan and the United States monitor and analyze relevant data and information in terms of its impacts on livelihoods and markets to identify potential threats to food security.
Once these issues are identified, FEWS NET uses a suite of communications and decision support products to help decision makers act to mitigate food insecurity. These products include monthly food security updates for 25 countries, regular food security outlooks, and alerts, as well as briefings and support to contingency and response planning efforts. More in-depth studies in areas such as livelihoods and markets provide additional information to support analysis as well as program and policy development.
FEWS NET also focuses its efforts on strengthening early warning and food security networks. Activities in this area include developing capacity, building and strengthening networks, developing policy-useful information, and building consensus around food security problems and solutions.
We’ve been warning, almost day in and day out, of the growing calamity of the dry lands of Africa, and most of this has fallen on deaf ears in Europe and the United States among people who should know better.
Jeffrey Sach, United Nation’s chief adviser on the Millennium Development Goals, on the drought in the Horn of Africa. The U.N. declared a famine in two regions of Southern Somalia, Wednesday.
Lesson plan and multimedia resources from PBS NewsHour Extra on the drought.
(via newshour)
Record Drought Threatens Millions in Eastern Africa
More than 10 million people are desperately in need of food assistance in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, the World Food Program estimated this week, as the worst drought in 60 years continues to ravage eastern Africa.
The situation in Somalia in particular is the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” the U.N. refugee agency said on Sunday, and child deaths at refugee camps are spiking to three times average emergency levels.
At the Dadaab camp in Kenya, more than a thousand new refugees are arriving each day, traveling days and even weeks from their homes in Somalia seeking food and medical attention.
Alexandra Lopoukhine is working with CARE to provide supplies to the camp inhabitants and the many thousands squatting outside the camp limits. There are nearly 380,000 people living in Dadaab, making it the largest refugee camp in the world, but it was built to hold just 90,000 people, she said.
The influx of new refugees has increased from about 200 a day in March to more than 1,600 a day now.
Read more HERE.
The World is about to See a New Nation—Promises and Pitfalls in South Sudan
South Sudan will declare itself the world’s newest country on Saturday in a ceremony that caps the region’s long struggle to cede from its northern neighbor. The world’s newest country will come into being on 9 July 2011 - exactly six years after the peace deal which ended the most recent north-south war took effect.
The big unknown is what will be the fate of the thousands of refugees who have been tossed about in the long and protracted war that has seen everything from ethnic cleansing to mass rape. One in three of South Sudan’s children are severely malnourished. Maternal mortality rates are the highest in the world. More than half of primary school age children are not in school. With a population roughly the size of London, the new country has less than 400 girls in the last grade of secondary school. In fact, young girls are more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than achieve literacy.
Read more HERE and below, and above all pray for this new country and its chance for a fresh start and perhaps peace.
