Youngest refugees bear brunt of Syrian war woes

Gathered on the desert floor, the Askar family chants prayers for their 1-year-old daughter Jawahir, who died of malnutrition and is buried beneath the sands of their informal refugee camp far from their Syrian hometown. Her father Mohammed Askar recounts, “I wish the circumstances were different and I could have saved my daughter, but we are poor and powerless and we have only God with us.”

Of the 4 million refugees who fled Syria’s grinding civil war, it is the conflict’s youngest exiles, like Jawahir, who often bear the brunt of its woes. More than 10,000 children have died in the four-year conflict, while over 2.8 million in and out of the country don’t go to school, according to the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF. Many suffer emotional problems from their experiences, while others get pressed into working to support their families, who struggle to have enough to eat.

Aid agencies have asked for $4.5 billion for 2015 to help refugees, but have been forced to slash support programs because of large funding gaps, which had a devastating effect on the amount of food aid coming.

“We survived the barrel bombs in Syria but I’m afraid we won’t survive the lack of health and food,” Kutana al-Hamadi  says.

[AP]

Angelina Jolie Pitt on humanitarian trip to Myanmar

On a humanitarian tour of Southeast Asia, special envoy for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Angelina Jolie Pitt is giving a voice to the people of Myanmar (formerly Burma). The actress met with Rohingya community representatives in Yangon on Friday, who spoke with her about the difficult conditions of life in Rakhine State. 

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group who have suffered waves of ethnic violence and oppression. In 2012, two outbreaks of conflict left almost 200 dead and about 140,000 displaced, according to the Myanmar Times. Many still remain in camps for internally displaced persons.

“The situation for the displaced inside this country is extremely serious,” Jolie Pitt said. “One man I met expressed his concerns by saying he was afraid that in years to come his community would be found only in history books – and that the lack of medicine and healthcare is a top priority,” she adds.

Jolie Pitt, who’s been following the situation since her first visit to Myanmar refugees in Thailand in 2002, is offering to help the government bring medical assistance to people in the Rakhine and Kachin States.

She also met with first-time female voters in Myanmar, during a trip to the “She Leads” program in Yangon. The women showed her how they check online if they and their family members are registered to vote, ahead of crucial elections in November 2015.

[People]  

Improving Humanitarian Aid

Excerpts of a Foreign Aid interview with David Millibrand,  President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee

I think that the best thing that you can say about humanitarian aid around the world is it’s genuinely saving lives. … And I think that the premium on that kind of life saving in the midst of conflict; international agencies employing local people and making the difference between life and death by addressing, above all, health needs, water and sanitation needs is the most heroic and the most humbling thing to see. And the truth is that nongovernmental organizations are being pushed into the front line as more countries, 30, 35 countries around the world, are consumed by increasingly violent, increasingly chaotic, increasingly lawless conflict.

So, the upside of the story is that in the midst of chaos and conflict, there is some fantastic work being done. The downside is, or the challenge is, not just that there’s more and more need for this kind of international humanitarian work, 60 million people now, according to the UN, displaced by conflict and disaster by the end of last year, but their needs are changing. They’re more urban rather than in refugee camps. They’re long term rather than short term. They’re in the midst of armed opposition groups, not countries fighting according to certain Geneva Conventions and other rules.

So, the challenge for the humanitarian sector is to reach more people, but it’s also to reach them in a more fulfilling and deeper way, so that we’re doing more than just keeping them alive.

If you think about the change that’s happened in international development since the inauguration of the Millennium Development Goals 15 years ago, the revolution there has been the application of top-grade social science … that have taught us best practice in vaccination, in education, in water and sanitation.     Read more   

Building Blocks, Bangalore, India

The Building Blocks program in Bangalore, India, provides a well-rounded kindergarten education for over 450 slum children who would otherwise not be able to attend school due to economics.

At its 6 schools located near slums in Bangalore, dedicated teachers employ an array of multi-sensory early learning techniques to introduce the basics of English reading and writing, arithmetic, social science, the arts, motor-skill development and character building. After two years in the program, most of the children are able to successfully pass the entrance exams to enter good English-medium primary schools.

Each K4-K5 school throughout Bangalore has an average of 75 students, and is strategically located near a slum neighborhood, facilitating regular school attendance and good parent-teacher rapport. For the students—all between the ages of 3-5, who mostly live in homes with no electricity, running water, or toilet—the school is not just about learning to read, write and count. The children learn basic hygiene and brush their teeth for the first time, and for most, looking at colorful books or using crayons and paintbrushes is a novelty.      Read more  

The psychological and medical consequences of the Palestinian occupation

With the one-year anniversary of the latest (but likely not the last) war in Gaza, all countries–the United States and European Union members in particular–that condone and help extend the occupation of the Palestinian territories, whether by subsidizing it through humanitarian or military aid or by giving political cover to its policies and practices, must confront their responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians.

Stepping out of a car in the West Bank town of Kafr Qaddum, I was greeted by … the Abu Ehab family–whose two-story house is on a slope just below the road we drove in on. Their walls do little to protect them from the exchange of tear gas, burning tires, and hurled rocks. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops frequently move around the Abu Ehab family’s property during nighttime search operations; at times, they enter the house.

The smell comes from “skunk,” the sewage-smelling liquid that the IDF uses to soak Palestinians and foreign protesters who gather weekly on this ashen road. It is so pungent that the family’s eldest son now vomits at the sight of food. The military also uses flashbang grenades to counter the demonstrations. After one detonated too close to the family’s home, the eldest daughter lost hearing in one ear.

“She used to not be able to finish a sentence without crying,” the psychologist with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who has been counseling the girl’s mother tells me. “Now, she can talk about her fears without breaking down.”

This is how MSF, as a medical humanitarian organization, measures the progress of those we assist in the occupied Palestinian territories. For the past 15 years, our programs in the West Bank and Gaza have focused mainly on mental health, but my colleagues at times feel like they can only give patients a thicker coat of psychological armor against the daily trauma of their lives. These patients are parents of teenagers being held in Israeli or Palestinian prisons, children with one or both parents in detention, families on the front lines of settler-Palestinian violence or intra-Palestinian violence, and those affected by nighttime IDF search operations or other military actions.

What our staff sees, day in and day out, are the medical consequences of the occupation. But while we can treat some of our patients’ symptoms, we can’t alter the underlying causes of their suffering. And as the suffering has become normalized, we have been questioning the wisdom of our presence. This is the humanitarian’s dilemma: how to alleviate the suffering of a population while not enabling the powers at the root of the pain.

[Jason Cone writing in “Foreign Policy”]

Charities face government challenges globally

The Indian government labeled Greenpeace India “anti-national” for its campaigns against coal mining, genetically modified crops and nuclear power, and blocked its bank accounts, deported foreign workers and stopped Indian staff from overseas travel. But it is not alone in facing a crackdown by governments which see the growing affluence and influence of charities backed by social media as a threat, say experts.

Thousands of foreign-funded non-government organizations from Latin America and Africa to the Middle East and Asia have come up against authorities imposing or drafting laws which put a squeeze on their foreign donations, jeopardizing their work. Over 60 countries in the last three years (These include Russia, China, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Uganda, Israel, Ethiopia, Angola, Honduras, Venezuela and Egypt) have sought to curb the ability of non-profit groups to receive or use overseas funds, using justifications which range from labeling them as “foreign agents” to allegations of financial misconduct, says the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL).

The move comes following a surge in funding–and a shift in focus for many non-profit groups that has made governments edgy. Civil society groups received $17.7 billion from developed nations in 2013, up from $2.7 billion in 2004, according to humanitarian data researcher Development Initiatives. Alongside this, they have shifted from traditional work in basic service provision to advocacy and campaigning, mobilizing public support through Facebook and Twitter on issues ranging from corruption and conservation to religious and gender rights.

In India over the last three months, the home affairs ministry has canceled the licenses of more than 13,000 organizations, saying they have violated a law on foreign funding. Pakistan has ordered all foreign non-profits to re-register within three months and is drafting a law allowing officials to stop overseas funded charities from operating.

Big donors are not immune. The U.S.-based Ford Foundation faces a probe into funding a group run by a prominent rights activist and critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and auditors are investigating the finances of charities funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Charities welcome regulation and transparency, aware of the need to keep the booming sector in check, but say the law is being abused to the detriment of those they are trying to help–the poor and marginalized.

[Reuters]

Doing good is harder than it looks

It’s clear that doing good is harder than it looks. For example, abundant evidence suggests that education can be transformative in a poor country, so donors often pay for schools. But building a school is expensive and can line the pockets of corrupt officials. And in my reporting I’ve found that the big truancy problem in poor countries typically involves not students but teachers: I remember one rural Indian school where the teachers appeared only once or twice a year to administer standardized tests. To make sure that the students didn’t do embarrassingly badly on those exams, the teachers wrote all the answers on the blackboard. The critics can cite similar unexpected difficulties in almost every nook of the aid universe.

An emerging synthesis … would acknowledge the shortcomings of aid, but also note some grand successes. For example, the number of children dying each year before the age of 5 has dropped by three million worldwide since 1990, largely because of foreign aid. Yes, aid often fails — but more than balancing the failures is quite a triumph: one child’s life saved every 11 seconds (according to calculations from United Nations statistics).

Moreover, pragmatic donors are figuring out creative ways to overcome the obstacles. Take education. Given the problems with school-building programs, donors have turned to other strategies to increase the number of students, and these are often much more cost-effective: (1) Deworm children. This costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces absenteeism from anemia, sickness and malnutrition. A Kenya study found, in effect, that it is only one twenty-fifth as expensive to increase school attendance by deworming students as by constructing schools. (2) Bribe parents. One of the most successful antipoverty initiatives is Oportunidades in Mexico, which pays impoverished mothers a monthly stipend if their kids attend school regularly. Oportunidades has raised high school enrollment in some rural areas by 85 percent.

The upshot is that we can now see that there are many aid programs that work very well. We don’t need to distract ourselves with theoretical questions about aid, so long as we can focus on deworming children and bribing parents. The new synthesis should embrace specific interventions that all sides agree have merit, while also borrowing from an important insight of the aid critics: trade is usually preferable to aid.

[Excerpts from Nicholas D. Kristof, author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”]