Flooding hits West Africa. Again.
admin September 10th, 2009
In the Spring it’s the Zambezi that floods regularly – and the Red Cross is putting in place its Zambezi River Basin Initiative to try to tackle that.
But at this time of year the flooding problem is in West Africa. Just a couple of days ago the BBC was reporting that 350,000 people had been affected in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Niger and Senegal.
Now CNN is quoting the UN as saying that the number affected has risen to 600,000. Its report says, “The World Food Programme (WFP) has set a goal of feeding 177,500 people, mainly in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where 150,000 people have been affected and key infrastructure — including a central hospital, schools, bridges and roads — has been damaged. The flooding in Burkina Faso is the worst in 90 years.”
And this is a recurring problem. In 2007 300 people died and 800,000 were affected by the storms and flooding that result from the West African rainy season that runs from June through to September.
But the sad thing is that even flooding and displacement on this scale does not make the television news or hit the front pages even though the UN is reporting that, “Roads and buildings have been ruined from Mauritania to Niger”, which covers a huge area . And if a disaster is not on TV in the West, it’s almost as if it hasn’t happened as far as donations and public offers of help are concerned.
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