Campaigners call for action after analysis finds only third of jabs pledged to poorer countries this year have so far been delivered
The UK is lagging behind other G7 countries in sharing surplus Covid vaccines with poorer countries, according to newly published figures.
The advocacy organisation One, which is campaigning to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030, described it as shaming for the UK government.
Continue reading...Climate finance plan needed to gain backing of developing nations for any deal at Glasgow talks
The world’s poorest countries are set to benefit from a new climate funding plan to help them cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, in an effort to break the impasse between developed and developing countries at the UN Cop26 climate summit
The UK government, as Cop26 host, will unveil the proposals on Monday along with ministers from Germany and Canada, who have been charged with drawing up a plan for climate finance, needed to gain the backing of scores of developing countries for any deal at the talks, which open in Glasgow next Sunday.
Continue reading...Government pocketed half of donations in 2020 as central bank forced UN agencies to use lower exchange rate
The Syrian government is siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid by forcing UN agencies to use a lower exchange rate, according to new research.
The Central Bank of Syria, which is sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, in effect made $60m (£44m) in 2020 by pocketing $0.51 of every aid dollar sent to Syria, making UN contracts one of the biggest money-making avenues for President Bashar al-Assad and his government, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Operations & Policy Center thinktank and the Center for Operational Analysis and Research found.
Continue reading...Exclusive: chancellor criticised by former Tory international development secretaries for planned use of $27.4bn windfall
Rishi Sunak is to save billions of pounds by counting as aid financial assistance to poor countries being provided as a result of a windfall Britain has received from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In a move that has been condemned by former Conservative international development secretaries, the chancellor has chosen not to use the UK’s share of a new $650bn IMF global fighting fund to increase the share of national output spent on aid.
Continue reading...Cuthbert Mutukwa fears disastrous consequences for home country if UK cuts go ahead as it nears ‘mine-free’ status
A Zimbabwean man who helped clear hundreds of landmines from the Falkland Islands has urged Britain not to go ahead with cuts that would see the government pull funding from his home country just as it nears “mine-free” status.
Cuthbert Mutukwa, 42, left his family in Zimbabwe to work for two years de-mining the Falkland Islands, the British overseas territory that was peppered with about 13,000 mines by Argentinian forces during the 1982 war.
Continue reading...Seven senior officials responsible for ‘delivering lifesaving aid’ told to leave amid de facto blockade of food, medicine and fuel
The Ethiopian government has told seven senior UN officials to leave the country, accusing them of “meddling in internal affairs”.
A statement from the foreign ministry said the officials – who include staff from the UN humanitarian agency, the UN human rights office and the children’s agency, Unicef – must leave Ethiopia within 72 hours.
Continue reading...Exclusive: UN agency must respond to the ‘real needs’ of the women and girls, says Julienne Lusenge, co-chair of the independent inquiry into the scandal
Survivors of sexual abuse by World Health Organization aid workers during the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak in 2018 should receive “substantive” reparations, the co-chair of an independent inquiry into the scandal has said.
Julienne Lusenge, a prominent Congolese human rights activist, said it was “essential” that the UN’s global health body drew up a workable plan for reparations to respond to the “real needs” of women and girls who became victims of abuse.
Continue reading...Seven years after fleeing army clashes with militants, 100 families eking out an existence on a hillside near the Afghan border are unable to return home
“Don’t talk to me about the government. They don’t help.”
Ninety-year-old Shah Mast is angry. He has been living in the cave he calls home for seven years, ever since an offensive by the Pakistan army against the Islamist militant group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) destroyed his home.
Continue reading...Inquiry commissioned by WHO details sexual abuse, including rape allegations, during DRC outbreak
The World Health Organization has described itself as “heartbroken” after an independent inquiry it commissioned said scores of women and girls were sexually abused by aid workers during the devastating 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The findings were described as “harrowing reading” by the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while its regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said she was “humbled, horrified and heartbroken”.
Continue reading...Aid worker describes ‘horrific’ scenes in one hospital where starving and malnourished children ‘look like skeletons’
At least 5 million people in Yemen are on the brink of famine and a further 16 million are “marching toward starvation”, as the country’s humanitarian crisis spirals out of control.
The situation in Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war, has been described as “rapidly deteriorating” by experts.
Continue reading...With rural areas of the country left to suffer, aid workers fear funds are drying up as global compassion fatigue sets in
David Nazaire, a 45-year-old coffee farmer from Beaumont, a small village in rural southern Haiti, was getting ready to harvest when an earthquake struck his home and livelihood. Much of the farming infrastructure – as well as nearby homes, schools and churches – was damaged or completely destroyed. A month later, he and thousands of rural Haitians – those most severely affected by the tremor – are still waiting for relief, and are not expecting it to arrive soon.
“The earthquake didn’t destroy our crops, but it did take everything else,” Nazaire says, outside a neighbour’s house, now a pile of rubble beneath plastic roof tiles supported by the remnants of concrete walls. “We were just getting ready to harvest, but that’s lost now.”
Continue reading...Evacuation of employees, not contractors, ‘splitting hairs’, says HRW, warning of days left to save lives
Afghan employees who worked as contractors on UK aid projects fear for their lives after not being granted resettlement in Britain.
The Guardian has been in contact with four families who said they had been targeted by the Taliban because they worked for the UK government, and have now been forced into hiding.
Continue reading...Covid-19 has shown the effectiveness of local partners. If the sector is to respond and rebuild, it must redistribute power
The UK’s cut to its aid budget comes to about £4bn a year. Such a dramatic reduction is a blow to many, but most of all to the local organisations who perpetually find themselves last in line for funding.
New research by the Vodafone Foundation reveals that, too often, only a small proportion of philanthropic funding earmarked for African development reaches local, African-led civil society organisations. Instead, most development funding favours intermediaries in the global north and international organisations.
Continue reading...Over the past four years, photographer Giles Clarke has reported from Yemen for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), documenting the tragedy of a country devastated by war but also the resilience of its people. The photojournalism festival Visa pour l’image is featuring his work at an exhibition in Perpignan, France
Continue reading...£200m project to eliminate avoidable blindness and disfigurement in Africa ends after funding is prematurely axed
A chandelier sparkling in the background, the grandeur of Downing Street gleaming behind him, Boris Johnson looks into the camera and speaks with solemnity. He is marking World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day, he says, to raise awareness of these “terrible afflictions … which impose an immense burden of suffering in developing countries”.
Huge progress has been made, he says, in the fight against the diseases, not least as a result of British aid to some of the poorest parts of the world. But there is more – much more – to be done: more than a billion people are still at risk, he warns, and that is why the UK “fully supports” the World Health Organization’s big elimination push over the next decade.
Continue reading...The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse
Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”
Continue reading...The number of children without carers is still not known, leaving them prey to gangs and abuse
Lilian, six years old and alone, still asks when her mother will return from the market on the edge of Les Cayes in southern Haiti.
When last month’s earthquake struck, Lilian was at home, occasionally checked on by her neighbours as her mother, Genieve, was selling fruit a few blocks away. When the ground began to convulse, the market partly collapsed. Genieve was hit by falling concrete and buried under rubble. Her death has left Lilian without anyone to care for her.
Continue reading...Unicef says hundreds of children have been separated from their families in chaos of Kabul evacuation
Access to food aid and other life-saving services in Afghanistan is close to running out, the United Nations has warned, as concern mounts that the country is facing a “looming humanitarian catastrophe”.
The grim assessment from the UN’s Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs [OCHA] came amid an appeal for an extra $200m (£145m) in emergency funding in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover sparked a host of new issues.
Continue reading...Covid, climate breakdown, poverty and war threaten return to school after pandemic kept 1.5bn children out of classes
The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread as a result of an unprecedented intensity of threats including Covid 19 and the climate crisis, a report warned today.
As classrooms across much of the world prepare to reopen after the summer holidays, a quarter of countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – have school systems that are at extreme or high risk of collapse, according to Save the Children.
Continue reading...To disrupt colonial power inequalities, the global south needs to take more control
There have been many studies published recently on the prevalence of racism in the international aid sector.
They have ranged from definitions of racial equity within global development, to the experiences of black, indigenous and other people of colour working in the sector, to the British government’s delayed sub-inquiry into racism as part of a larger inquiry into the culture and philosophy of UK aid.
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