Africa News blog

Is Africa drought a chance to enact new UK policy?

New ways of managing aid are being debated in Britain as global concerns mount over a hunger crisis devastating the drought-affected Horn of Africa.

Randolph Kent, director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College in London, says the crisis provides a perfect opportunity for the British government to test its recent promise to reform how it responds to humanitarian emergencies.

The severe drought, caused by the driest weather since 1995 in East Africa, has affected an estimated 10 million people and is expected to continue to worsen into early 2012, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

While Kent acknowledges the importance of a $145 million (90.2 million pound) injection of humanitarian aid from the British government, he says the money will not help prevent the next Horn of Africa drought and that the government needs to become more “anticipatory”.

“This disaster has to teach us that the ways we’ve approached such crises in the past is not good enough,” Kent said in a statement. “If we don’t want to be consistently on a back foot when disasters happen, then we need evidence of strategic planning taking place at an international and regional level now.”

The British government’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), released in June, recognises that as a result of the increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters – a trend expected to grow with climate change and population growth – preparedness must be a key goal.

Update on the refugee camp that now lives in the sky

Screen grab of the introduction to the online game "The City That Shouldn't Exist"

A few months ago I wrote a story about a controversial online game posted on Facebook called the “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” that was consequently pulled off the Web days after its launch amid claims it objectified refugees and lacked sensitivity.

The game developed by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) with funding from ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian agency, and designed to raise awareness of Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, is now back online but with some noticeable changes.

Some features have been removed such as Mr. ECHO’s lover calling him “my hero” as he leaps out of bed on hearing an emergency siren go off. That was deemed too cheesy. You can still rescue or “drag and drop” your refugees as you do your supplies but instead of them walking towards a pile of bones, now they just walk towards a hole.

“My refugees were dying like flies because I couldn’t work out how to drag’n'drop supplies. Haven’t felt so stressed since I worked for ECHO!” posted Marianne Farrar-Hockley on the Facebook page hosting the game.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t

Darfur’s joint U.N.-African Union peacekeepers face a dilemma in Darfur which could shape the future of the world’s largest U.N.-funded force.

After violence left five people dead in the highly volatile Kalma Camp, six refugees sought sanctuary in the UNAMID force’s police base there. They are thought to be rebel sympathisers and the government accuses them of instigating the camp clashes, demanding that UNAMID hand them over.

Kalma, just outside Darfur’s largest town Nyala, has long been a problem for the Khartoum government, whose offices in the camp were burned down by angry refugees. Rebel supporters in the camp have obtained arms and there have been clashes with government police in the area.

Now if the six are responsible for the violence, which was between refugees who support rebel leader Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur and those who took part in peace talks which Nur rejects, then it is Sudan’s right to try them in a court of law.

However the government is headed by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for presiding over genocide and war crimes against these same Darfuris, which is why they are in the refugee camps in the first place.

Repeated reports during the seven-year conflict of the torture of Darfuri detainees give a pretty good indication that they are unlikely to get a fair trial if UNAMID hands them over.

So what to do?

Is Ethiopia’s development plan too “ambitious”?

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi seemed to anticipate this week exactly what a lot people were thinking about his government’s plan to double the poor country’s GDP and wean it off food aid within just five years.

“I think that this is a very ambitious plan,” he said.

“This is indeed an extremely ambitious plan,” a few minutes later.

And, once more for luck, “We have put in place a high-case scenario which is clearly very, very ambitious.”

So far, so ambitious.

But, after those disclaimers, a man many see as Africa’s most economically literate leader didn’t shy away from saying he thought Ethiopia could get there.

Could aid squeeze help Africa?

The dire state of rich countries’ public finances is likely to squeeze aid to Africa in the next few years, although it may be the bitter pill the fast-growing continent needs to wean itself off handouts.

Even though sub-Saharan economies grew at a pacy 5 percent before the 2009 global slump, aid to the poorest continent also rose after the Group of Seven (G7) richest states promised in 2005 to double development assistance.

The ONE Campaign led by Irish rockers-turned-lobbyists Bob Geldof and Bono said last month the G7 would miss that target, but was on track to provide $13.7 billion of the $22.6 billion extra pledged at the landmark meeting in Scotland.

Despite Africa’s huge population — now more than a billion — such increases have undoubtedly had a positive impact, especially in areas such as public health.

However, the extra cash has caused aid to become more entrenched in African budgets, even in “success stories” such as Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia that relied on charity for around half their revenue in 2008, according to World Bank figures.

Critics also argue that aid undermines the social contract that should exist between an elected administration and its people, creating lazy, unaccountable and corrupt government.

Now, with rapidly growing populations and the prospect of an aid slowdown — if not outright reverse — African governments are scoping out alternative, less fickle, funding sources: more domestic debt, a broader tax base and foreign bonds.

West must change approach to Africa

Tom Cargill, Assistant Head of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, writes on the West’s relationship with Africa:

French President Nicholas Sarkozy put it best this week, when he spoke of the increasing important of Africa in Global Affairs: “Africa’s formidable demographics and its considerable resources make it the main reservoir for world economic growth in the decades to come.”

This is indeed the principal finding of our new Chatham House Report ‘Our Common Strategic Interests: Africa’s role in the post G8 World’. Yet so far there is very little evidence that Western policy makers, publics, or most importantly, businesses, are waking up to the opportunities that are slowly draining away from them with each passing day.

For the past ten years, fundamental change has been taking place across large parts of Africa. Growth rates and stability have increased. Political, regulatory and security reform have deepened. Increasing investment from China, but also Brazil, India, Turkey, South Korea, Argentina and other ambitious emerging powers has acted for the most part as an accelerant.

Even the global financial crisis has in some ways hastened this process, for while in the short and medium term it had a devastating impact on millions across Africa, it has also revealed the true ebb of power from East to West, and encouraged the new economic actors of the G20 to chase access to the 40 percent of the world’s mineral resources, and 1 billion consumers gathered in Africa. Almost as important is the 25 percent of UN General Assembly votes that are represented by the continent’s 53 countries.

Meanwhile, many Western countries seem trapped in a humanitarian conception of Africa.

Popular media coverage and policy judgement is overwhelmed with a perception that Africa is simply a problem continent with little strategic value, except as a space where largess is shown and good things done to make up in some small way for the messy reality of international diplomacy.

African poverty falling faster than thought?

The old image of an Africa doomed to get ever poorer has certainly lost credence over the past decade even if it is a view still held by some.

Well, according to a new study, Africans are getting wealthier more quickly than previously believed and the poorest continent’s riches are also spreading beyond the narrow confines of its elite.

“Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought,” the study by U.S.-based economists Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy said.

“The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period.”

The research, which assesses poverty levels and income distribution from 1970 to 2006, lends weight to a belief among local and foreign investors that Africa is finally getting its act together 50 years after shaking off the colonial shackles.

The study, published by the private, non-profit U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research, also challenges the suggestion that strong African growth over the last decade or more has done little to alleviate grassroots poverty due to the countervailing effect of equally strong population expansion.

Going by an inflation-adjusted $1 per person per day yardstick, the study, using statistical analysis pioneered by the two authors said 32 percent of Africans were in poverty in 2006, compared to 42 percent in 1995 and 40 percent in 1970.

The unnumbered dead

The simple answer to the question of how many people died in Congo’s civil war is “too many”.

Trying to get a realistic figure is fraught with difficulties and a new report suggests that a widely used estimate of 5.4 million dead – potentially making Congo the deadliest conflict since World War Two – is hugely inaccurate and that the loss of life may be less than half that.

The aid group that came up with the original estimate unsurprisingly says the new report is wrong.

The problem is the way estimates are reached.

One way is to do a body count, but that is next to impossible in a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Very few of the victims are shot, blown up or otherwise die as a result of violence. Most succumb to disease or malnutrition. But then who died as a result of the war and who would have died anyway in a country where survival is normally so tough?

That is where the other methodology comes in. It is based on using the difference between the rate at which people were dying before the war and the mortality rate once it has started. It should indicate the number of those who have died as both a direct and indirect result of the war. This sort of calculation led to the figure of 5.4 million dead in Congo.

The problem is that if you get the wrong mortality rates, even by a small margin, the estimate can be way off. That is what the Human Security Report Project says happened with the Congo figures. The International Rescue Committee stands by its estimate.

Why is the West still feeding Ethiopia?

Aid – a new model?