admin October 11th, 2009
Advance Aid took to the ‘Fourth Plinth’ in Trafalgar Square in Central London on Saturday morning, October 10th.
Howard Sharman of Advance Aid went on the plinth dressed in a sandwich board to promote its theme of ‘Don’t Donate, Invest’. And he used the time to deliver a lecture to the assembled person on the current state of the aid industry and how Advance Aid will make a difference.
admin October 8th, 2009
Advance Aid was in Nairobi last week at the Humanitarian Development Summit. David Dickie spoke on Responsible Ethical Purchasing and Supply Chain Management and took part in a panel that included Hon. Alfred Khang’ati, Assistant Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister.
We were delighted by the level of interest shown in the Advance Aid concept by the assembled delegates, who were a mix of NGO people and suppliers to the international aid industry.
admin September 25th, 2009
The numbers of people displaced around the world – either by natural disasters or by man-made disasters like wars – is mind-boggling.
And whilst our attention here in the North is grabbed from time to time by a particularly newsworthy disaster, which affects a particularly large number of people, the scale of the ongoing displacements is what should be being noted.
admin September 24th, 2009
The London School of Economics runs a fantastic public lecture series all through the year, many of which are concerned with development issues and climate change.
This week it is running a series under the heading International Growth Centre Growth Week, and on Tuesday Advance Aid attended a session on Natural Resource Management, which featured a presentation by Paul Collier, professor of economics at Oxford University and co-director of the International Growth Centre.
admin September 21st, 2009
With 500,000+ suffering from flooding in West Africa, East Africa is now facing drought and hunger, brought on by a combination of war and the failure of the rains.
There are already nearly 20m people in the region dependent on food aid and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is forecasting that this number will increase.
admin September 17th, 2009
So now it’s official. The World Bank has spoken. Climate change is not just the cause of more extreme weather events, which hit developing countries disproportionately, it is also disproportionately damaging to them economically.
The World Development Report 2010, the Press edition of which has just been published, comments, “Warming of 2°C could result in a 4 to 5 percent permanent reduction in annual per capita consumption in Africa and South Asia, as opposed to minimal losses in high-income countries…It is estimated that developing countries will bear most of the costs of the damages—some 75–80 percent.”
admin September 14th, 2009
UNHCR reported last week that its Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina Jolie, had visited Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp situated on the Kenya-Somali border on Saturday. Describing the camp as ‘one of the most dire’ she had seen, Jolie concluded her visit by asking “if this is the better solution, then what must it be like in Somalia?”
During her day-long visit, Jolie visited one of the three camps that together host around 285,000 refugees. She met a number of families including a mother just arrived in the camp, after walking for days with her three young children to flee war-torn Somalia.
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.
admin September 7th, 2009
Back in July David Dickie spoke at the International Aid & Trade event, held this year in Washington, DC.
He was on a panel chaired by the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan alongside representatives of the American Red Cross, Transparency International, Trade Without Borders and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
