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Archive for the ‘International’ Category

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The International Committee of the Red Cross recorded over 650 such attacks between mid-2008 and late 2010 in 16 nations it examined. In total, 1,834 people were killed or injured in these attacks.

On Monday (24 April), charity heads, academics, and healthcare experts and practitioners from around the world gathered in London to discuss the ICRC’s Healthcare in danger campaign.

As speakers at the conference shared their personal experiences of attacks, it became apparent those who are directly injured or killed are only the first people to be affected.

Devastating effect

Dr. Unni Karunakara, president of Médecins Sans Frontières International, explained how his organisation has had to suspend services in its recently opened maternity hospital in Khost, Afghanistan, after an explosion in the hospital compound last week. Since opening in March, the hospital had already delivered 600 babies.

As Professor Sir Michael Marmot argued in his presentation – citing Afghanistan as an example – lack of security affects both the healthcare system and general levels of health. According to Marmot, while only one in 46,500 women in Europe die during childbirth, the figure in Afghanistan is one in ten.

So you can imagine what happens when a maternity hospital has to close. And this is the affect of just one incident out of the hundreds occurring each year. In insecure regions, people are already extremely vulnerable and the loss of a healthcare facility can be devastating.

Dedicated healthcare volunteers and staff

Direct attacks on buildings, vehicles and staff are the tip of the iceberg – people’s access to healthcare can also be disrupted by administrative obstruction, discrimination and general insecurity.

All this boils down, as Geoff Loane, ICRC UK head of mission, said, to the wounded and sick not being able to get the care they deserve.

Despite the difficulties and dangers, volunteers and staff of many organisations worldwide continue to put risk their lives to save others. This video shows the courage and vulnerability of Libya Red Crescent volunteers working on the front lines to deliver healthcare:

While violence in Libya is no longer so severe, healthcare workers in many countries are still at risk. Despite this, volunteers and staff from the Red Cross and many other agencies continue to put themselves in danger to help vulnerable people access care. For instance, Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers face huge risks daily to support people in areas of unrest.

Find out more about the Healthcare in danger project

Read how we’re helping people in challenging security situations in Syria, Kenya, Niger and Mali

Watch videos of Carolyn Miller, Doctor Vivienne Nathanson, Doctor Unni Karunakara and Professor Sir Andrew Haines, who all spoke at the conference.

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This is a guest post by Henry Makiwa, British Red Cross senior media relations officer, who visited Burkina Faso last week.

My earliest memory of a drought goes back to 1990 – 91 as young lad growing up in the Zimbabwean countryside. I remember noticing the gradual dropping of water levels in the local lake where we used to fish and speedboat with my brothers on weekends.

Massive islands and rock boulders were steadily surfacing where stretches of deep blue waters used to cover. On land, the animals sauntered in forlorn despair as grass and leaves – their food – wilted away in the pitiless heat that cloaked the land. Not so long after, we noticed villagers around us and from farther away, frantically drive their animals to the town markets to sell them so that they could attain some money for grains. At the drought’s worst, aid trucks began travelling across the countryside giving relief food to people.

Fortuitously my family was spared much of the lacking for food, as we were fortunate to have saved enough from the previous harvest.

Nonetheless, this had been a harrowing time. One that got burned on my juvenile psyche as an abiding recollection and definition of a “drought”.

And so as I landed at Ouagadougou international airport, Burkina Faso, with fellow Red Cross colleagues and members of the press, I had a formed estimation of the crisis that has gripped the Sahel region of West Africa since late 2011.

Events on the ground proved to be grimmer.

I saw dry rivers, parched lakes, failed crops, empty granaries, dying livestock, strewn animal carcasses and; the young and old trading what little assets and precious possessions they had left, for food and drink.

For many Burkinabe, life is now an existence of taking a day at a time. This irksome situation is made even bleaker by the dreary weather forecasts which predict a continued dry spell. Normally, rains are expected as early as May, cueing a planting season. Harvests – which would bring much needed respite to the food crisis – traditionally arrive after August.

As the Daily Mail reported today, women and children are the worst affected by the food crisis in Burkina Faso. Images carried in the paper testify the extent of the strain on the world’s third poorest country’s already stretched health delivery system.

Doctor Anice Kroda is the head physician at Djibo hospital, a few miles off the Burkinabe border with Mali. He says the crisis has been exacerbated by the influx of refugees from the country’s northern neighbours.

Mali has been in the throes of armed conflicts following a long-running rebellion by ethnic Tuaregs in the north, and a military coup carried out by the army in the past month.

Dr. Kroda said: “The situation is really severe. Here we take the most malnourished children – particularly the ones that have complications – and we treat them for malnutrition.

“Many would have died were it not for the support of the Red Cross which pays for their treatment. We are in a very dry zone here so the population is malnourished, so with the drought that’s hitting us now, things are very bad. Last year there wasn’t such a serious problem, but this year we are going to see a much higher number of children. The large number of refugees coming into the area is also making things worse,” Dr. Kroda added.

This is the situation pertaining in only one district of one of the seven Sahelian countries affected by the food crisis. Aid agencies say that over 13 million people in Mali, Chad, Senegal, Niger, Gambia, Mauritania and Burkina Faso face severe food shortages.

The Red Cross urgently needs more funds so it can take action to avoid the situation in Mali and other countries deteriorating as it did in the Horn of Africa last year. Please give what you can today to our appeal.

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The unrest that has swept across the Arab world in the past 16 months took everyone by surprise. But, while nobody could predict the nature or scale of the current crisis, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent was prepared for a variety of disasters.

Syria is vulnerable to a range of natural disasters, including earthquakes, drought and flooding. Collapsing buildings and road traffic accidents are also common risks. Conflicts in neighbouring countries have led to large influxes of refugees in previous years.

Since 2004, the British Red Cross has been helping the Syrian Arab Red Crescent modernise its disaster management operations, putting plans in place and testing its response to national disasters.

Ready for anything

As well as providing support to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent during the current violence and unrest, funds and support from the British Red Cross previously helped the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to:

• train new volunteers in disaster management, including how to prepare for disasters
• train national intervention teams, and provide trained volunteers with uniforms and kits
• organise field training at all branches, teaching volunteers about shelter, emergency health, nutrition, food aid, water, sanitation, logistics, search and rescue, and relief work
• help all branches make contingency plans to deal with a national disaster
• print and distribute disaster management manuals, containing information on preparedness, response and other essential topics
• run induction courses for newly-elected governing board members
• develop its volunteer management.

The training and field exercises enabled volunteers to practice their response to various different scenarios. The transferable technical and practical skills they learnt helped them deal with the current crisis when it arose.

So, when unrest began in 2011, Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteers were ready and able to help. As one of the only agencies able to operate in the country, their quick and efficient response to the crisis has already helped thousands of people across the country.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross are responding as the crisis develops, providing medical care, food, blankets and hygiene items, evacuating wounded people, and helping people who have been displaced.

The British Red Cross continues to support the Syrian Arab Red Crescent through its Syria Crisis Appeal.

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Before mid-morning it is already hot in Tin Akoff and Mohamed Ingouda, 46, stands patiently in line waiting for his Burkinabe Red Cross food voucher.

“We are all suffering due to the bad rain and bad harvest,” says Mohamed, who is a farmer. “I have 11 children to feed and of course I have a problem to find food.”

In 1974, Mohamed moved to the Ivory Coast where he had a job as a fishmonger, but in 2007 he lost his job and went home to Tin Akoff, in the north of Burkina Faso. Like most people in the Sahel region where he lives, Mohamed now survives by growing millet and sorghum and tending livestock.

Access to food

Failed crops, rising food prices and the underlying issue of poverty mean thousands of families who usually rely on growing their own food can’t afford to buy the food available in the market. In October 2011, the Burkinabe government reported the price of maize had increased by 35 per cent compared to 2010. *

Those who have livestock are having to sell them at lower than usual prices, in order to buy their staple foods, knowing they still have difficult months ahead of them until their next harvest, around October.

Families without livestock assets are turning to more extreme coping mechanisms, such as: searching for wild food; reducing the number of meals they eat; depending on friends and extended family; sending girls to the city to work as home help and men leaving to look for work in the Ivory Coast.

Uncertain future

“People are not realising how bad it is,” Mohamed says. “But sometimes we spend a day without eating at all. Also, there’s no pasture for the lambs and they are not in a good state. We have to sell our lambs to buy some rice or millet, but the price we can sell them for is going down and the price of grains is going up.

“I’ve had to sell 15 lambs over the last seven months. I have never experienced it like this before. Last year one bag of millet cost 12,000 CFA francs [£15] and now it is double around 27,000 CFA [£33]. We don’t have enough money to buy millet to last us until the next harvest and we don’t have stocks of food, we are really suffering.

“Already, we are only eating once instead of three times a day and this has been going on for seven months.”

Red Cross food vouchers enable families to buy basic foods at local shops in their villages to meet their immediate needs without having to sell off more assets. In most cases, vouchers are preferable to distributing food parcels as they have the extra benefit of stimulating local markets, ensuring traders don’t take their produce elsewhere.

Despite his situation Mohamed has a generous smile. As he picks up his food voucher and heads off to the local store, he says: “This will help us survive for some weeks. After that, I don’t know what the future will be, but I must keep my family together.”

Donate to our West Africa Food Crisis Appeal

Read more stories about people affected by the food crisis

*  W.Africa Food Security Working Group, Sahel Strategy 2012

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So a food crisis stems from a shortage of food, right? Not necessarily. When communities are in food crisis, it is usually because people are unable to grow or buy enough to eat, rather than because of an overall shortage of food.

If a farmer’s crop fails – or their goats get ill and have to be sold at a low price – they will not have money to buy enough food, no matter how well-stocked the market is. Even if people can make a little money, a poor harvest will often cause food prices to soar unaffordably high.

Across the Sahel region of west Africa, regional unrest, higher food prices, drought, pest problems and reduced income from remittances have been key factors in turning the annual hunger season into a crisis. They have all disrupted people’s ability make money, or produce food, and afford food that is available to buy.

Disrupted livelihoods

While most areas of the Sahel are experiencing a combination of these trigger factors, places with violence and unrest are among the most vulnerable. In northern Mali, conflict between the Tuareg liberation movement and government forces has led to over 126,000 people being displaced from their homes and over 93,000 more fleeing into neighbouring Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Mauritania and Algeria.

Mary Atkinson, British Red Cross food security advisor, explains: “Regions where there is conflict are often the most food insecure. Violence and displacement disrupt people’s livelihoods, block their access to shops and markets, and force food prices up. It is likely that the conflict in Mali will make the food crisis there considerably worse.”

Continued fighting in Mali – coupled with a coup on 21 March 2012 – has added to people’s urgent needs, and made humanitarian access increasingly difficult.

Access to the most vulnerable

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is one of the only agencies able to help people in areas of conflict in Mali. The British Red Cross has already given £125,000 to support the ICRC’s economic security work in Mali and Niger.

These funds will also be used to provide emergency assistance of essential household items – tarpaulins, blankets, sleeping mats, mosquito nets, clothing, hygiene kits, buckets and kitchen sets – to approximately 9,600 people, as part of a programme that includes substantial food aid.

In Mali and across the Sahel region, more than 13 million people face severe food shortages. Support our work to help people in the region access food; donate to our West Africa Food Crisis Appeal.

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