admin November 6th, 2009
The United Nations is warning that up to 750,000 people in Kenya, nearly half of them Somali refugees, could be caught up in flooding and landslides from heavy rains expected to peak in November.
The people most at risk are the 300,000 mainly Somali refugees in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps. Kakuma is in northwestern Kenya and Dadaab in the east on the border with Somalia. The overcrowded Dadaab complex of three camps was built to hold some 90,000 people but its population has swollen to three times that, in the process becoming home to more refugees than any other site in the world, according to the UNHCR.
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Tags: cholera, Floods, Kenya, Somalia, UNHCR, WHO
admin October 29th, 2009
First there was the drought, then the rains, and then floods. That’s the real-life experience of people in Kenya as the pictures below show. Just a few weeks ago Kenya was in the grip of a serious drought as the rains due earlier in the year had largely failed and there were doubts over whether the October/November rains would come either.
When Advance Aid was in Nairobi at the end of September the grass almost everywhere was brown and the Masai were bringing their cattle into the centre of the city in search of grass verges that might have been watered that the painfully thin cattle could feed on.
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Tags: Drought, Floods, Imperial College, Kenya, Somalia
admin October 14th, 2009
The sheer scale of the devastation caused by the cyclones that hit the Philippines continues to shock and amaze. The cyclones left 648 dead, with many still missing, and affected more than six million people, some 300,000 of whom are still housed in makeshift evacuation centres.
Now the UN is to revise its appeal made on 7th October. Initially it called for $74m, but now it says that this “was clearly not enough” and the UN is stressing that this number would be revised upwards when more detailed reports come in from the field.
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Tags: cyclone, earthquake, Floods, Indonesia, Philippines, Samoa, South East Asia, tsunami, UN
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.
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Tags: Drought, East Africa, Eritea, Ethiopia, FAO, Floods, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, West Africa
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.
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Tags: Benin, Burkina Faso, Floods, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Red Cross, Senegal, UN, West Africa, WFP, Zambezi
