Category Archives: Aid

UK government accused of ignoring victims in efforts to tackle ‘sex for aid’

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Foreign office’s ‘top-down’ approach failing people it is seeking to protect, says watchdog, with abuse cases still underreported

The British government has not listened to victims in its efforts to tackle abuse in the humanitarian sector after the “sex for aid” scandals, a UK watchdog has said.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (Icai) said the government was falling short because of a “top-down” approach and needed to listen and learn from recipients of aid who remained reluctant to report abuse allegations.

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Increase funding or abandon hope of ending malaria, TB and Aids, UK warned

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Global Fund urges UK and other donors to pledge billions to get efforts to end diseases by 2030 ‘back on track’ after catastrophic impact of Covid

Britain is being urged to pledge billions of dollars to get the fight against malaria, tuberculosis and Aids “back on track” after efforts were ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UK has historically been one of the main donors to the Global Fund, an international financing organisation aimed at ending the three deadly epidemics by 2030. Now it is warning that, unless donors make an unprecedented total funding pledge of $18bn (£13.25bn) this year, that goal will be missed.

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Somalis in crowded camps on ‘brink of death’ as drought worsens

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UN warns of looming catastrophe as hundreds of thousands more arrive at settlements that do not have enough food or water

Somalia’s displacement camps are coming under intense pressure with more than 300,000 people leaving their homes in search of food and water so far this year as the country experiences its worst drought in decades.

People have been walking miles to camps, already home to those escaping the country’s protracted violence, after three consecutive failed rainy seasons since October 2020 that have decimated crops and livestock. Somalia has more than 2,400 such settlements, which already lack resources.

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Scared, hungry and cold: child workers in Kabul – picture essay

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As temperatures fall below freezing, children as young as four trying to make a living on the Afghan capital’s streets are all that stand between their family and starvation

Amid the roadside restaurants and bustling crowds in one of Kabul’s busiest markets, a 10-year-old girl is trying to sell plastic bags to shoppers squeezing past her. “If I don’t work, we will go hungry,” Shaista says. Shops in the Afghan capital are stacked with food, but her family cannot afford any of it.

Each morning, Shaista buys a few shopping bags for 5 afghani (4p) each, then goes to the market to sell them for double that. As the UN predicts that 97% of Afghans could be living below the poverty line by June, the number of child labourers and beggars has tripled in Kabul, aid workers say. Many are fighting just to survive.

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‘I can’t go home’: families hide in Myanmar’s forests as fighting rages

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As the military targets civilians and blocks aid, those who have left home to avoid violence risk death to find food and healthcare

When fighting erupted in May between pro-democracy armed groups and the military in Demoso township in Myanmar’s Karenni state (also known as Kayah), Khu Bue Reh* had to leave his village with his wife and five-year-old son.

They hid in the dense forest, their only shelter a tarpaulin, surviving on what little food they had carried with them.

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‘We pray for rain’: Ethiopia faces catastrophic hunger as cattle perish in severe drought

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Animal carcasses litter the land in areas where the rains have failed, as millions go without enough food and water in a country already grappling with civil war

The circumference of Nimo Abdi Duh’s upper arm measures just 12cm and, while the number means nothing to her, it does to the health workers treating her. Nimo, two, like so many children in the arid lowlands of Ethiopia, is suffering from malnutrition.

“We have been affected by the drought,” says her mother, Shems Dire, looking anxiously on. “We don’t have milk to give to the children. My child is sick due to lack of food, and this happened because of the drought … Our cattle have been harmed by the drought. We have lost so many.

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‘We just sleep and hope we don’t perish’: 2m in Tigray in urgent need of food – UN

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Aid workers call for ‘humanitarian pause’ so crucial supplies can be delivered, after first assessment of hunger in the region since war broke out

At least 2 million people in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray are suffering from an extreme lack of food, with the 15-month conflict between rebel and government forces pushing families to the brink, the UN’s emergency food agency has found.

In the first comprehensive assessment the World Food Programme (WFP) has carried out in Tigray since the start of the war, 37% of the population were found to be severely food insecure, meaning they had at times run out of food and gone a day or more without eating.

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We can afford to reverse poverty and climate breakdown. What we can’t afford is the alternative | Kevin Watkins

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Our global finance system is failing to rise to the challenges we face. It’s time it was reimagined – and grounded in our shared humanity

“The peoples of the Earth,” Henry Morgenthau said, “are inseparably linked by a deep underlying community of purpose.”

In July 1944, Morgenthau, the US Treasury secretary, was closing the Bretton Woods conference with a reflection on extreme nationalism and the failures of cooperation that had led to war. Cautioning against the pursuit of national interest through “the plan-less, senseless rivalry that divided us”, he outlined an accord for new institutions grounded in an appeal to shared humanity.

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Change to aid rules needed to prevent famine in Afghanistan, say UK experts

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Former security and diplomatic chiefs warn that country is at risk of economic collapse as Taliban begin talks in Norway

Afghanistan can only be saved from state collapse and widespread starvation if the definition of legitimate humanitarian aid to the country is broadened, some of Britain’s most senior former security and diplomatic chiefs have said.

The group, including two former national security advisers, a former chief of defence staff and a former ambassador to Afghanistan, write in a letter published in the Guardian that the aid that can be sent to the Taliban-controlled country without fear of sanctions is too restricted.

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‘I’ve already sold my daughters; now, my kidney’: winter in Afghanistan’s slums

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Crushing poverty is forcing starving displaced people to make desperate choices

The temperature is dropping to below zero in western Afghanistan and Delaram Rahmati is struggling to find food for her eight children.

Since leaving the family home in the country’s Badghis province four years ago, the Rahmatis have been living in a mud hut with a plastic roof in one of Herat city’s slums. Drought made their village unliveable and the land unworkable. Like an estimated 3.5 million Afghans who have been forced to leave their homes, the Rahmatis now live in a neighbourhood for internally displaced people (IDP).

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Vulnerable Malians could ‘pay the price’ of heavy sanctions, warn aid groups

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NGOs call for aid exemption to EU-backed sanctions imposed after election postponement and arrival of Russian paramilitary

More than a dozen aid organisations have called for humanitarian exemptions to heavy sanctions imposed on Mali after the military leadership postponed planned February elections.

The EU has announced support for the sanctions imposed earlier this month by the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), which include closing borders and a trade embargo.

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World’s poorest bear brunt of climate crisis: 10 underreported emergencies

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Care International report highlights ‘deep injustice’ neglected by world’s media, as extreme weather along with Covid wipes out decades of progress

From Afghanistan to Ethiopia, about 235 million people worldwide needed assistance in 2021. But while some crises received global attention, others are lesser known.

Humanitarian organisation Care International has published its annual report of the 10 countries that had the least attention in online articles in five languages around the world in 2021, despite each having at least 1 million people affected by conflict or climate disasters.

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Warning over fuel and food stocks as ‘hellish’ Tigray reels from airstrikes

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Stocks run perilously low, with main supply route into region of northern Ethiopia unusable since December

Humanitarian organisations in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia are running perilously low on food and fuel stocks as an intensified wave of airstrikes further hampers a threadbare aid effort already stymied by lack of access.

In what it calls a de facto blockade, the UN says fighting between Tigrayan rebels and forces loyal to the Ethiopian government has rendered the main supply route into the war-torn region unusable since mid-December.

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Ethiopia lifts five-month suspension of Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid work

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NRC, which was accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, says it will struggle to reach those in need as Tigray conflict enters third year

Ethiopia has lifted a five-month suspension of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid work after it cleared the organisation of allegations of spreading “misinformation”.

The government ordered the NRC, along with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), to stop work for three months in July, including operations in the Tigray conflict zone. Both organisations were ordered to stop their humanitarian work in July but while MSF’s suspension was lifted in October, the NRC’s was extended.

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Gordon Brown: west is sleepwalking into Afghanistan disaster

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Ex-PM warns poverty and starvation mean country is at risk of world’s biggest humanitarian crisis

The west is “sleepwalking into the biggest humanitarian crisis of our times” in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has warned, as he called for a support package to save the country from economic and social collapse after the Taliban’s takeover.

Four months after the western-backed government was overthrown following a mass military withdrawal, the former UK prime minister said the case for action was not based only on morals but also “in our self-interest”.

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UK accused of abandoning world’s poor as aid turned into ‘colonial’ investment

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Rebrand of Foreign Office’s development arm, seen as effort to rival China’s loans, will shift aid to private sector, warn NGOs and unions

The British government has been accused by NGOs and trade unions of “chasing colonial post-Brexit fantasies” at the expense of the world’s poorest as they urge Liz Truss to keep aid focused on poverty reduction rather than geopolitical manoeuvring.

In a joint letter to the foreign secretary, the group criticises the rebranding of the UK’s development investment arm, which will see the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) become British International Investment (BII) next year.

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Helping refugees starving in Poland’s icy border forests is illegal – but it’s not the real crime | Anna Alboth

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The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle

One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.

Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.

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‘More cautious’ China shifts Africa approach from debt to vaccine diplomacy

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Analysis: After two decades of major financial aid, Beijing is rethinking its strategy on continent amid Covid crisis and fierce competition for power, analysts say

As debt concerns rise and a new coronavirus variant emerges, China appears to be adjusting its approach to Africa: cutting finance pledges while doubling down on vaccine diplomacy.

On Monday last week, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, opened a China-Africa forum with a pledge to supply 1bn vaccine doses to Africa, amid global concern over the emergence of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. He also pledged $40bn to the continent, ranging from credit lines to investments – a significant cut from the $60bn promised at the previous two summits.

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Activists call for revolution in ‘dated and colonial’ aid funding

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Aspen Institute’s New Voices want donors to exercise humility and trust those receiving grants to know what their communities need

Aid donors are being urged to revolutionise the way money is spent to move away from colonial ideas and create meaningful change.

Ahead of a two-day conference this week, activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America have called on public and private global health donors – including governments, the United Nations, private philanthropists and international organisations – to prioritise funding for programmes driven by the needs of the community involved, rather than dictated by preconceived objectives.

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Failure to share Covid vaccines ‘coming back to haunt us’, says Gordon Brown

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Ex-PM says world was ‘forewarned’ of dangers of failing to vaccinate poorer countries amid rise of new variant

The failure of the world to get vaccines to the developing world is “coming back to haunt us”, Gordon Brown has warned, as experts said the emergence of variants such as B.1.1.529 could have been avoided if jabs had been more fairly distributed.

Writing in the Guardian, the Labour former prime minister said the world had been “forewarned” that a lack of vaccines in poorer countries could have serious consequences for the pandemic.

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