Category Archives: Aid

Morocco earthquake: France ‘ready to help’ despite frosty diplomatic relations

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France offers €5m to assist disaster relief efforts amid political rift between Rabat and Paris

France’s foreign minister has said it is up to Morocco whether to seek French aid in dealing with its deadliest earthquake in more than six decades, and France is ready to help if asked.

Catherine Colonna said France had pledged €5m (£4.3m) to aid organisations in the north African country, where at least 2,500 people are believed to have died and a further 2,400 have been injured, but it was for Morocco to decide who it officially asked for assistance.

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‘Dire crisis for children’ in Sudan, aid groups warn as millions more go hungry

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Up to 17,000 more children a day lack food, Save the Children say, as global indifference to humanitarian crisis condemned as ‘racist’

The past four months of fighting in Sudan has pushed millions into food insecurity – with an additional 1.5 million children expected to fall into crisis levels of hunger by September – as aid agencies say they are struggling to reach people.

Up to 17,000 children a day have been falling into crisis levels of hunger, Save the Children warned on Tuesday. With 4 million people displaced so far, the charity said more people were facing hunger in Sudan than at any point since records there began in 2012.

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UN aid deliveries to rebel-held area of Syria poised to resume

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The Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey will reopen to the UN for six months after negotiations with Assad’s government

The United Nations is poised to resume aid deliveries into north-western Syria, an area controlled by rebels, via a crossing that has been a lifeline for the region, after aid workers said Damascus appeared to loosen terms that had led to a hiatus.

Deliveries from Turkey via the Bab al-Hawa crossing stopped in July when western powers and Russia, the Syrian government’s main ally, failed to agree on extending a UN security council mandate for the operation. Syria then gave unilateral approval – but on terms that the UN rejected as unacceptable.

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UK aid budget cuts are ‘death sentence’ for world’s most vulnerable children

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Save the Children and Oxfam urge government to restore aid budget back to 0.7% of national income

UK aid cuts are a “death sentence” for children in the world’s most dangerous places, aid charities have warned after an internal government report revealed the impact of budget reductions on the most vulnerable.

The government faced calls from NGOs including Save the Children and Oxfam to restore the aid budget back to 0.7% of national income, after the potential effects of cuts were outlined in grim detail by an assessment produced by civil servants.

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Women’s health at risk from UK aid cuts, Foreign Office warned

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Thousands more women will be forced into unsafe abortions and die in pregnancy and childbirth, ministers told

Hundreds of thousands more women will face unsafe abortions and thousands will die in pregnancy and childbirth as a result of UK aid cuts in 2023-24, Foreign Office ministers were warned in an internal assessment.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) published its programme allocations for the next two years last month, showing that official development assistance (ODA) spend is due to rise marginally in 2023-24 and then increase by 12% in 2024-25 to £8.3bn.

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Russian veto on aid lifeline to Syria could bring ‘catastrophe’ for millions

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Fears rise that UN could be forced into compromise with Damascus to keep vital corridor open from Turkey to rebel-held Idlib

Aid groups and their backers at the United Nations are pushing to revive an aid corridor into rebel-held Syria after Russia vetoed the renewal of the cross-border lifeline that has been getting food and medicines into Syria for almost a decade.

Moscow has repeatedly attempted to stymie deliveries through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing from Turkey into Idlib, a strip of land controlled by the de facto opposition known as the National Salvation government, which is linked to the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militant group. At least nine people were killed in a Russian airstrike on a vegetable market in rural Idlib last month.

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Cross-border aid to Syria blocked in ‘act of utter cruelty’ by Russia at UN vote

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Use of veto threatens operations on route from Turkey that supports millions of people in north-west

Russia has been accused of “an act of utter cruelty” after it used its veto at the UN security council to block a nine-month renewal of cross-border aid designed to help 4 million people living in rebel-held north-west Syria.

The vote throws into doubt the continued existence of the key aid route into Syria from Turkey, and represents another hammer blow to a population still reeling from the devastating earthquake that struck the region in February.

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US aid policies undermined success of Afghanistan mission, says watchdog chief

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Poor oversight, lack of understanding and weak collaboration between allies contributed to ease of Taliban takeover, conclude US and UK aid bodies at London conference

America’s huge, badly-coordinated and politically-driven aid programme in Afghanistan engendered the corruption that undermined its entire mission and turned Afghans away from the western coalition, according to the head of a US aid watchdog.

“We did not really understand Afghanistan or how it worked as a country,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar), told a conference at the defence and security thinktank the Royal United Services Institute.

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Keir Starmer considers ditching Labour pledge to reinstate DfID

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Exclusive: Dropping promise to restore Department for International Development would follow series of U-turns

Keir Starmer is considering dropping a promise to reinstate the Department for International Development (DfID), prompting anger from senior Labour figures and high-profile names in the international development world.

The Labour leader promised last year to restore the department, which was scrapped in 2020 by Boris Johnson, who called it a “giant cashpoint in the sky”.

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Ukraine lacks capacity to process huge sums in aid, official admits

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Largest amount of money Kyiv previously worked with was $6bn a year in 2014, Mustafa Nayyem says

Ukraine will struggle to absorb the expected billions of western private and public sector aid for its recovery not due to corruption, but a simple lack of capacity to process and invest such huge sums, a senior Ukraine official has said on the eve of the UK-sponsored Ukraine recovery conference in London.

“It is about the capacity to work with this amount of money,” said Mustafa Nayyem, the head of the Ukraine State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development.

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West needs strategy to tie Ukraine aid to corruption progress, thinktank says

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German Marshall Fund says oligarchs biding their time until after war ends to reassert their influence

Western powers will only protect Ukraine’s multibillion-dollar postwar recovery if they agree a unified strategy to make aid conditional on clear progress on combating judicial corruption, reinstating the obligation on Ukrainian public officials to declare assets and ensuring all recovery finds can be digitally traced, according to an authoritative report from the German Marshall Fund.

The US thinktank’s proposals, matching calls from Ukrainian civil society and G7 ambassadors in Ukraine, reflect a concern that donors have not yet assembled a strategy to ensure how recovery funds can be monitored in a country that has made progress in tackling capture by oligarchs since 2014 but still has many unreformed institutions.

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Aid agencies raise alarm as solo children cross Chad border to flee Sudan fighting

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Unicef says ‘more and more unaccompanied children’ among thousands of refugees streaming across 1,000km-long border

Hundreds of unaccompanied children have crossed the border from Sudan into Chad in recent weeks as fighting separates families and forces minors to make the arduous journey to safety without their parents.

Humanitarian workers say “more and more” children are arriving alone in the neighbouring country, to which more than 100,000 refugees, about 60% of them under-18s, have fled since fighting erupted between rival military factions in mid-April.

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Food aid suspended in Ethiopia after ‘widespread and coordinated’ thievery

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UN and US halt food assistance in the country, where 20 million people rely on aid, in order to investigate ‘diversion’ of supplies

Food aid to Ethiopia has been suspended after the discovery that humanitarian supplies meant for people in need were being stolen.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday that it is halting food assistance while it rolled out “enhanced safeguards and controls that will ensure humanitarian food assistance reaches targeted, vulnerable people”. It comes a day after the US Agency for International Development (USAid) said it was doing the same, after a “countrywide review” uncovered “a widespread and coordinated campaign” that was diverting food assistance from Ethiopian people.

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UK government under fire for investing overseas aid in fossil fuel firms

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Taxpayer’s money also going to companies found to be flouting human rights in Kenya and DRC, says Commons committee

The UK government is under attack for investing taxpayers’ money in fossil fuel companies, a hospital in Kenya accused of imprisoning patients who couldn’t pay for treatment, and a business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that exposed workers to dangerous chemicals and dumped untreated industrial waste.

MPs questioned the investments at a two-hour session in parliament on Tuesday, and excoriated Andrew Mitchell, minister for development, for making overseas aid available to a company owned by Africa’s richest man that is suspected of causing serious environmental damage.

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UK funding cuts to east Africa ‘insulting and shortsighted’, say aid organisations

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NGOs dismayed at reduction in Britain’s contribution as crisis-hit region faces challenges from drought, rising prices and conflict

The UK has been accused of taking the “insulting and shortsighted” decision to cut humanitarian aid to east Africa at a time of chronic drought, conflict and rising food prices.

At a United Nations pledging conference in New York on Wednesday, which the UK is co-chairing, Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s international development minister, announced a humanitarian aid package to the region of £143m.

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Race against time to stop ‘humanitarian disaster’ among Sudan refugees in Chad

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Coming rainy season threatens 80,000 living in ‘heartbreaking’ conditions in vulnerable border region after fleeing war at home

Tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees, many of them children, who have crossed the border into Chad risk a “major humanitarian disaster” when the rainy season begins within weeks, a Red Cross official has warned.

About 80,000 people have sought refuge in the country to the west of Sudan as weeks of fighting between two warring generals forces hundreds of thousands from their homes.

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Aid agencies in Sudan plead with factions to allow supplies to reach needy

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Six trucks of humanitarian supplies looted while airstrikes in Khartoum undermine ceasefire

Aid agencies are pleading with battling factions in Sudan to allow humanitarian assistance to reach the needy, after six trucks of humanitarian supplies were looted and airstrikes in Khartoum undermined a new ceasefire.

Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said on Wednesday he was seeking assurances that would allow for movement of staff and supplies.

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UK government funding anti-LGBTQ+ organisation in Uganda, says report

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The Inter-Religious Council of Uganda, which is openly homophobic, is a direct recipient of UK aid money

The UK government is helping to fund the work of a virulently homophobic religious organisation in Uganda, whose leaders have backed a proposed law that would make identifying as gay a criminal offence, a report has found.

Analysing official data given to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the report by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC) found a “staggering” number of connections between anti-LGBTQ+ organisations in Uganda and international aid donors, including the UK.

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Humanitarian aid ‘impossible’ as fighting in Sudan traps millions

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Hopes of 24-hour ceasefire to evacuate civilians and wounded after US secretary of state intervenes

Fighting continued in Sudan hours after an internationally brokered truce was supposed to have come into effect, as forces loyal to dueling generals battled for key locations in the capital and accused each other of violating the cease-fire.

At least 185 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured in more than four days of fighting that has pitted army units loyal to Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s transitional governing sovereign council, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who is deputy head of the council. Their power struggle has derailed a shift to civilian rule and raised fears of a wider conflict.

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UN ready for ‘heartbreaking’ decision to pull out of Afghanistan

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Officials say it will leave in May if Taliban cannot be persuaded to let local women work for organisation

The UN is ready to take the “heartbreaking” decision to pull out of Afghanistan in May if it cannot persuade the Taliban to let local women work for the organisation, officials have said.

The warning comes after UN officials spent months negotiating with the group’s leaders in the hope of persuading them to make exceptions to a hardline edict this month barring local women from working for it, according to the head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Achim Steiner.

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