Category: Humanitarian Aid

Have yachts vs have nots?

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The gap between rich and poor is getting wider.

Are you shocked? Unfortunately, probably not. You might be when I tell you how wide the gap actually is, though.

The latest statistics show that the richest 85 people in the world now own the same wealth as the entire poorest half of the world’s population.

… But it’s not just about money.

It’s about the fact that this tiny number of people control and exploit so many of the world’s resources, not to mention their disproportionate influence on the economic and political decisions that affect ordinary people’s lives. And as the ‘have yachts’ gain power, billions of ‘have nots’ go without food, education and medical help.

[Courtesy Oxfam] 

Foreign aid to Afghanistan bypasses the forgotten poor

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For all the billions of dollars in foreign aid that have poured into Afghanistan over the past 12 years, Sajeda, her head-to-toe burqa covered in dust, sobs that the world has forgotten the poorest of the poor in the largely untroubled north of the country.

One of the paradoxes of Western aid: the northern region of Afghanistan which supported the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 has got significantly less help than the south and east, home of the Taliban militants.

Over the past decade, much of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding has been spent in the strongholds of the insurgents as part of Washington’s strategy to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population. A disproportionate share of U.S. aid, which makes about two-thirds of all development assistance in Afghanistan, has ended up in the southern provinces where it has been used to achieve political and military objectives.

“We are the poorest and most unfortunate people of this country and no one pays attention to us. We are forgotten,” said Sajeda, who lost 12 members of her family in the landslide that killed hundreds in northern Badakhshan province.

Despite the most expensive reconstruction effort ever undertaken in a single country, Afghanistan remains one of the world’s poorest states.

[Reuters]

Humanitarian groups urge action on Central African Republic

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Citing fears of genocide, representatives of humanitarian organizations tried Thursday to focus U.S. lawmakers’ attention on the Central African Republic, where the situation is on the verge of exploding into a “decades-long conflict,” one aid group said.

Mercy Corps believes “right now is the time to act, and we are asking Congress to make smart, forward-thinking decisions,” said Madeline Rose, a policy adviser to the group, in a telephone interview prior to addressing the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on African Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations.

The group fears “that the current crisis in CAR is on the verge of metastasizing into a new, decades-long conflict,” she added. At least 2,000 people have died in the fighting, and 2.2 million others — about half the country’s population — need humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.

The continuing violence has raised the specter of genocide, as occurred 20 years ago in Rwanda.

“Do not repeat the mistakes of the past — heed the lessons,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last month during a visit to the country.

Catholic Relief Services Chief Operating Officer Sean Callahan. “The world stood by as nearly one million people were killed in Rwanda 20 yrs ago, and we cannot let the violence tear the social fabric of CAR,” he said.

Rose agreed. “We’ve seen this over and over again in the way the international community responds to crises like these — where we focus too narrowly on short-term, emergency needs and don’t take a step back to make long-term, strategic investments and decisions about how to solve the root problem.”

[CNN]

Bill Gates urges wealthy Chinese to help the poor

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Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Monday took to the pages of the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, to encourage people in China to do more for the poor.

“China has many successful entrepreneurs and business people. I hope that more people of insight will put their talents to work to improve the lives of poor people in China and around the world, and seek solutions for them,” Gates wrote in an editorial.

Philanthropy in China has yet to take off, as some wealthy Chinese fear generous donations could invite unwanted attention on their fortunes. China ranks towards the bottom of the list of countries where people give money to charity, volunteer or help a stranger, according to The World Giving Index, compiled by the Charities Aid Foundation.

The editorial by Gates comes just days after the founders of Chinese internet company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced the establishment of a charitable trust which will focus on the environment and health, and could be worth as much as $3 billion, making it one of the biggest in Asia.

Reports in the past two years by the New York Times and Bloomberg News have chronicled the accumulation of spectacular wealth among family members of some of China’s top Communist Party leaders.

[Reuters]

Does Foreign Aid Work?

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Fareed Zakaria speaks with Helene Gayle, president of CARE USA, and Bill Easterly, professor of economics at New York University, about whether foreign aid is effective. Some excerpts:

The context here is Bill Gates did his annual letter in which he argued that our foreign aid has been astonishingly effective and that people should stop attacking it.  One of the people who has attacked it and whom Gates mentions by name often when he makes this point is Bill Easterly. So, Bill, what is your response to Gates’ basic argument?

Easterly: Well, you know what sends me at the moment is that foreign aid is really on the wrong side of the debate that we see going on right now in the world between freedom and autocracy.  And we see, too often, the aid agencies and the philanthropists, like even Mr. Gates himself, siding with the autocrats in many poor countries against the poor people who are rising up, seeking their own freedom.

Gayle: I think the case has been made that aid is very effective and that being able to provide resources in the right way makes a difference.  It saves lives.  It educates children.  It helps to feed people.  And I think we know that, for instance, rates of poverty have decreased dramatically over the last decades. And so I think the numbers are there that show that, clearly, aid has made a difference. I think the debate is really around how can we make aid more effective.

Watch the video for the full discussion. 

Street Children in Kinshasa, Congo

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Grace Lambila works at an ORPER shelter (Oeuvre de Reclassement et de Protection des Enfants de la Rue), an organization that provides aid, and sometimes a home, to street children in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Founded in 1981 by a Catholic priest, ORPER runs “open” centers where children are free to come and go, and “closed” centers where they are watched more closely.

Some of the boys who stay at the open center include:

Fundi, a 13-year-old boy, was brought to Kinshasa a year ago by his mother, along with his sister, where she planned to join the children’s father, but they discovered he had taken another wife. Fundi’s mother returned home, leaving the children with their father, but after being mistreated, Fundi’s sister went to their uncle and he ran away to live on the streets.

Kape was abandoned by his parents, and lived on the streets until he was taken in by ORPER when he was 10. Kape now brings other boys to an open center, where they a place to shower, to eat, to sleep, and to learn.

Christian takes remedial classes during the day and works in a parking lot at night. He makes around $3 a day, enough to buy extra food.

Ariel, 13, still goes to the main square to beg. On most days he makes around $1.50.

Other children at ORPER earn money by reselling plastic bags they found in the trash, or work as prostitutes. Some drink alcohol or dissolve Valium in Primus beer, shake it, drink it, follow with cannabis, and repeat the sequence.

Annette Wanzio, who has worked with street children for 20 years, says, “In Africa, children belong to everyone—an uncle, an aunt.”

She and others at ORPER work hard to place children with their extended families, which can sometimes take years or fail entirely; of every 100 children who come through the center, only 40 return to their families. “Sometimes families say, ‘Well, they’re doing well, so why should they return to us?’ ” she adds.

[Christian Science Monitor]        ….continued

Street girls’ success stories in Democratic Republic of Congo

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Sister Stella Ekka was born near Calcutta and has worked for 17 years in the Congolese capital at a girls’ closed center, Home Maman Souzanne, where she supervises 23 girls, ages 6 to 15.

A few of the girls at the center suffered from physical or sexual abuse and had run away from home. Some were abandoned by parents too poor to support them.

The girls have few possessions—a change of clothes, a school uniform. They share 30 books, some crayons, a doll, and a game of Scrabble. One room has a TV.

Sister Stella takes great pride in the girl who got a job in a bank, the one who married a doctor, and a young woman who went to another country. “That makes me happy. That encourages me,” she said.

Another girl who is now at the center also gives Sister Stella reason to hope—a girl who barely said a word when she first arrived. T. lives at the center and goes to the afternoon session at the Lycée Kasa-Vubu, where she studies French. She is in 10th grade but is unsure of her age. She came to the center on her own four years ago after some other girls on the street told her about it. After T. came to the center her mother died of AIDS. Her brother now also lives in a closed center. They do not know who their father is.

When T. lived with her mother she was accused of witchcraft and often beaten, sometimes for no reason and once for breaking a porcelain plate while doing the dishes. In the evening her mother would leave her and her brother alone, giving them both medicine to make them sleep so that she could work as a prostitute.

At Home Maman Souzanne, T. helps prepare the food for the girls, and she goes to the market to buy vegetables and fish. She washes clothes and takes care of the young ones. “I want to be a TV journalist,” she says, “so I can report on my country’s living conditions.”

[Christian Science Monitor]

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Lebanon highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world

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The number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has passed 1 million, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Thursday, making up almost a quarter of the country’s resident population.

Their numbers have made Lebanon the country with the highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world, the agency said.

“The influx of a million refugees would be massive in any country. For Lebanon, a small nation beset by internal difficulties, the impact is staggering,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

The total number of registered Syrian refugees in all countries is 2.58 million, according to the United Nations. Other nations with large populations of Syrian refugees include Jordan and Turkey.

The number in Lebanon has now risen into seven figures, from just 18,000 two years ago.U.N. staff in Lebanon register 2,500 new Syrian refugees every day, the UNHCR said.

India and Southeast Asia officially certified polio-free

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Rukhsar Khatoon, 4, is too young to fully grasp the significance of her life: that she is the final documented case of polio in a country of 1.2 billion people. She has become the greatest symbol of India’s valiant — and successful — effort to rid itself of a crippling and potentially deadly disease.

Her face has appeared in newspapers and on television. She’s been invited to national events by Rotary International, the organization that led the effort to rid India of polio. She is a literal poster child, an inspiration, a symbol of a feat that no doctor or health official thought possible even a few years ago. But this past Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially certified India as being polio-free.

This is great news that all Southeast Asia is certified polio-free by the World Health Organization — a momentous achievement for global public health and the worldwide effort to eradicate polio.

This extraordinary feat wasn’t easy. Most experts believed that India, with its high population density, poor health care services and regional accessibility problems, would remain the most polio-endemic region in the world.

Great achievements don’t just happen; they require the great efforts of many. The polio eradication movement, started in 1988, was a joint effort between the Indian government; WHO; Rotary International; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; UNICEF and various other NGOs; the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and about 2 million workers who vaccinated nearly 170 million throughout the country to finally wipe out the disease.

Truly, this worldwide effort should serve as a reminder that when the global community bands together to solve an issue, great things can be achieved. And today should serve as a call to not simply continue the efforts but to exponentially increase them.

[CNN]

Pakistan’s Impending Famine

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Pakistan’s Thar desert, in the southeastern Tharparkar district, is home to about a million residents, and is a harsh landscape in which to eke out an existence in the best of times.

Media reports have revealed that dozens of people—many of them children—have died from malnutrition over the last three months in the bone-dry desert region. And things could soon get much worse.

Local residents say that while there is not significantly less water than there usually is during this dry winter season, the 30 percent drop in rainfall over the monsoons has significantly affected them. Residents live on the edge of survival, and the smallest pressure from the climate can push them into extreme poverty or malnutrition, says Zaffar Junejo, the chief of the Thardeep Rural Development Programme (TRDP), which has been working in this area for the last 18 years.

Tharparkar is one of the country’s most food insecure districts, with the WFP declaring residents to be in a state of “severe food insecurity”. Health is another major concern, with 47 percent of Tharparkar’s children categorized as “malnourished”.

Since March 7, relief goods have been streaming into the area from all over the country, in the wake of a widely reported “drought”.

Nearly half of Pakistan’s 180 million people lack access to safe water. No other nation has a higher infant mortality rate, and only a few have more cases of tuberculosis.