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 25th, 2009
On Friday last week the African Union (AU) adopted a new convention that will provide legal protection and assistance to millions of people displaced within their own countries by conflicts and natural calamities on the continent. All good stuff, but will it be more than window dressing, and will it make any real difference to the lives of the IDPs?
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Tags: African Union, Burundi, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, IDPs, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe
admin October 16th, 2009
According to a report published yesterday on IRIN, Africa hosts at least 11 million of the world’s 25 million conflict-affected internally displaced people (IDPs) and millions more are displaced annually by natural disasters.
For example, Sudan has an estimated 4-5 million IDPs, thanks to the recent civil war in the south, and violence in Darfur and the east.
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Tags: Central African Republic, Chad, DRC, IDPs, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda
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 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.
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Tags: Angelina Jolie, Oxfam, Somalia, UNHCR
