Resilience wasn’t built in a day

By Anouk Delafortrie, Regional Information Officer for West Africa, ECHO

Upon interviewing Lenli Traoré, a small farmer in Tapoa, the easternmost province of Burkina Faso, about how his family will be coping after the failed harvest he pulls a faded photo from his breast pocket. “Paguidamba”, he explains, “was one year old when she died. She was ill and became malnourished. We waited too long to seek medical help.” The loss of his daughter five years ago has left Lenli mourning, prompting him to share the fading depiction of the girl with a big belly so as to keep her memory alive. Touched by his gesture, I come to appreciate the true value of him cherishing his lastborn Dieudonné which he tenderly holds while his wife Kanlafé prepares the family meal.

 

At only 7 months Dieudonné has already been seriously ill twice during the rainy season, first measles, then malaria. And luckily, this time, his mother had been included as a beneficiary of Action Against Hunger’s cash transfer programme in the region. Although initially meant as a form of food assistance, Kanlafé spent almost her entire last instalment on medical bills for Dieudonné. But the family is happy to have had the possibility to seek care immediately. Most of the 75€ that Kanlafé received in 5 instalments during the ‘lean season’, the hardest months of the year when food and water become scarce, were used to buy food and condiments as well as soap for their family of nine.

 

There is no silver bullet to solving the erosion of coping mechanisms which a decade of food crises, shifting climate patterns and increasing food prices have brought upon many families of the Sahel like the Traoré’s. The European Commission’s humanitarian aid department ECHO has been supporting various resilience-building pilot programmes, ranging from seasonal cash transfers for poor households to subsidised health care for the most vulnerable, which could make a real difference if combined and scaled up at the national level.

 

 

 

“Humanitarian aid has its limits,” says ECHO’s head of office in Burkina Faso Eric Pitois. “Our goal is to save lives, and undertake some preventative action. But we have to go further now and encourage donors and governments to commit to long-term policies that will lift these people out of extreme poverty.”

 

Resilience wasn’t built in a dayLooking at all that is being achieved in regions where pilot programmes are running, their immense potential becomes apparent. In 5 of the 63 Burkinabe sanitary districts, ECHO funds programmes to ensure free health care for children under five, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. The results are spectacular in that the average number of visits to health centres by mothers and children has multiplied many times over. This, in turn, is a blessing when striving to prevent children from becoming severely malnourished and dying from lack of care.

 

“Every year at the time of harvest, when parents are busy in the fields, the number of severely malnourished children admitted with medical complications increases,” says Action Against Hunger’s Dr. Issa Sawadogo who provides technical support for the treatment of severe acute malnutrition in Tapoa’s provincial hospital. “Children suffer the most when families don’t manage to be food self-sufficient. Malnutrition really needs to be considered as a public health priority and the solutions should not only come from NGOs.”

 

Brought together under an initiative to build resilience in the Sahel and West Africa – AGIR or the Global Alliance for Resilience Initiative – Dr. Issa’s point of view is gaining ground. The realization that increased agricultural production alone will not suffice to feed an exponentially growing population is sinking in. Infrastructure works and optimizing agricultural outputs can be extremely useful, but if there is one thing that humanitarians in this region are demonstrating, it is that investing in policies which shield the most vulnerable families, who are likely to benefit little from these works and agriculture schemes, from ‘falling in deeper’ is needed at the same time.

 

“Now is indeed the time to take action,” agrees Burkina Faso’s minister of agriculture Mahama Zoungrana. “Resilience should not be a single-sector effort, because it is a multi-disciplinary issue. We need to build on the best practices we’ve seen throughout the years and pull them together in AGIR so as to build long-term programmes that will allow our people to live in dignity.”

 

When asked about this year’s harvest, Lenli replied that the stock of cereals will only cover the family’s needs for 6 months. Alone in his field, shedding blood, sweat and tears to keep his family alive, one realizes it is not by lack of determination nor hard work that fathers like him come to lose their children, but by lack of a safety net.

 

AGIR aims to achieve zero hunger in West Africa by 2032. Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither will resilience -, but building it on the right foundations can prevent the edifice from collapsing.

For more go to http://ec.europa.eu/echo/index_en.htm
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The Dying Breeds

By Michael Boyce, Refugees International

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso --  If you drive along the roads of northern Burkina Faso, as my colleagues and I have these past two weeks, you won’t always see the usual signs of human activity. While the population here is growing rapidly, the Sahel remains a sparsely populated region, and desiccated savannah dominates the landscape – stretching for miles into the distance.

 

But look a bit closer, and you will see that the Sahel is really one big, busy highway - traversed not by humans, but by their massive herds of livestock.

 

Cattle, sheep, and goats patrol this area year-round in search of grass, leaving in their wake close-shorn fields and huge volumes of manure. For untold generations, people here have consumed their milk and meat or sold it in nearby markets. Now however, as climate change has begun to hit the Sahel, herds are thinning out and their owners are suffering.

 

 

Mamadou, who lives in the town of Boulyiba, is one of many residents who lost livestock in the last two years. “Right now it’s so dry that we have a hard time feeding our animals,” he said, walking through a barren, brick-red field. “But if we sell an animal, that’s a year’s worth of work gone. So if you have a bad season and sell a number of animals, it’s almost impossible to recover.”

 

In centuries past, steady rains from May to September replenished the Sahelian grasslands, turning them from a dusty grey to a lush green. But in the last two decades, the rains have shifted. Now they come early or late, providing either too much water or too little. Good pasture is getting harder to find, and families have to sell their livestock to buy enough food in-between the harvests.

 

To most people in the West, saving for an emergency means funding a bank account or buying a savings bond. In the Sahel, however, people buy livestock to accumulate and store their wealth. So as people here lose their herds, they become poorer and less able to bounce back after a crisis.

 

A few hours north of Birguin, the 2,000 residents of Gourtoure are still reeling from an unprecedented flood in 2012 which washed away their entire village.  More than 3,000 goats and sheep were swept up in six-foot-high floodwaters, their carcasses left dangling from the trees. “Things are miserable here,” one of the village elders told us. “AGED [a local aid agency] gave us two animals after the floods, but they can’t give us what we lost.”

 

Residents of Gourtoure are still reeling from an unprecedented flood in 2012
Credit: Refugees International (Burkina Faso - 2013)

 

If global climate change continues as experts predict, then the Sahel will be badly affected. Weather events that are extreme today will become the norm. Drought will alternate with flood as rains grow more erratic, and rising temperatures will scorch land that was once productive. That will mean more hardships for the people of this region. And as the livestock on which they depend dwindle, they may have no choice but to leave the Sahel for good.

 

Michael Boyce is the Press & Information Officer for Refugees International, a non-profit organization that works to end displacement and stateless crises worldwide and accepts no government or UN funding.

 

For more visit http://www.refintl.org/

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Good news from the front lines of hunger

Ertharin Cousin, Executive Director of the World Food Programme

 The past year – my first as Executive Director of the World Food Programme – has vanished in a blur.  The unfolding crisis in Syria and neighbouring countries has kept all of us in the humanitarian community busy, but for me, it is the continuing crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa that has provided a constant backbeat to my first twelve months in this job.

I chose Niger as the first country I visited as Executive Director in April last year.  At the time, the country was at the epicentre of a drought that had affected the whole Sahel region, pushing millions into the protective arms of the humanitarian community.   Hunger gnawed at the very soul of people caught in the unforgiving lean season that precedes the arrival of crops from the new harvest.

Twelve months later, when I visited Burkina Faso and Mali, millions were still facing the prospect of the next hunger season.  But this time they were better equipped to cope, even though the simmering conflict in Mali had complicated matters by forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. 

In 2012, humanitarian agencies and national governments worked together to avert a potential catastrophe.  In 2013 we are helping those same communities continue on the road to recovery as they adapt to shifts in weather patterns that have made droughts more frequent and more severe.

This is all good news.  Lives have been saved and money has been invested in building resilience, ensuring the people of the Sahel are better equipped to cope with future droughts.  But does good news get the attention it deserves?

Blink and you would have missed any news coverage of the successful early intervention that prevented disaster in the Sahel in 2012. This year, the Sahel has barely registered on the news media radar.  I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing any coverage of the healthy babies I saw in Mopti, Mali when I visited a few weeks ago.

Good humanitarian stories, it seems, are not worthy subject matter for newspaper headlines or top billing on television news channels, even when the lives of millions are at stake and tax-payers’ money is being used efficiently to provide vital assistance.

It’s not so long ago that a television report featuring harrowing images of a starving child would open the floodgates of support, compelling governments and the public to respond, donating the cash that humanitarian agencies need to stop more children going hungry.  It is a formula that has worked again and again since the first televised famine in Ethiopia in 1984, and it has been difficult for humanitarian organisations to resist.

At some point or other, we have all been complicit in identifying a “poster child” to tug on the heartstrings of the public and encourage them to reach for their wallets.  But while this may have worked in the past, it is becoming increasingly obvious that people have seen and read enough about food shortages and famine to acquire a more questioning approach to the causes of hunger and the potential solutions.

Today, potential supporters are more likely to ask why after so much work has been done, are children still starving?  And what has been achieved after all the millions of dollars have been spent, when so many people are still vulnerable to hunger?  As humanitarian agencies we must answer these questions  ourselves, but we also depend on media organisations to help us deliver the message explaining the rationale behind our response as well as to highlight success when it is deserved.

Of course we don’t work for each other, but media organisations and humanitarian agencies do depend heavily on each other’s goodwill.  We support each other as we strive to fulfil our different missions, finding ourselves accidental partners at the scene of every disaster.

The Sahel in 2012 was no Biafra, nor was it Ethiopia in 1984, or Somalia in 2011.  But human suffering – that image of a severely malnourished child - should not be the measure of whether a story merits news coverage.  Our role in the humanitarian sector must be to inspire journalists to move beyond reporting that is driven primarily by images that exemplify our collective failure.  If it takes television footage of a starving child to move a donor into action then we are acting too late.

For more go to www.wfp.org
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Defusing the Sahel time bomb – ECHO Director General visits the Sahel

 

At the beginning of the 2013 lean season in the Sahel, when people´s resources and food reserves start running low, ECHO´s Director General, Claus Sørensen, visited the region. Here is what he found on the ground.

 

 

 

For more go to http://ec.europa.eu/echo/
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Mali: Conditions remain hard, the needs acute

Photo gallery by ICRC

Northern Mali has been the scene of armed violence for almost 16 months. Conditions remain hard, and the needs acute. To continue to help the hundreds of thousands of people suffering the effects of the conflict, the ICRC has launched an appeal for an additional CHF 40 million.

 

 

For more visit www.icrc.org

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The Sahel Food Crisis and #SahelNow

 by Unicef-USA

The lives of 1,000,000 children are at risk right now in the Sahel region in West and Central Africa. Crops have failed. Families have nothing to eat.

We can save them if we act now. Sound the alarm. Share this video. http://youtu.be/zRg9izN6T3s

We can rush food, nutrition and other emergency relief to help children in the region, but we need your help. We have to alert the world about this looming crisis. We need your help to sound the alarm.

Make sure you’re following http://www.facebook.com/UNICEF-USA and http://twitter.com/unicefusa

Mali: Drinking water a priority in north

By ICRC

The humanitarian situation in northern Mali is still a source of concern. Displaced persons in the north-east corner of the country lack food and water. The ICRC and the Mali Red Cross are working to help people who have been affected by the conflict.

"The country is facing a difficult humanitarian situation," said Jean Nicholas Marti, the head of the ICRC regional delegation for Mali and Niger. "In the northern region, access to drinking water is still a big worry for recently displaced people in Tinzawatene, close to the Algerian border and in some other towns such as Ménaka, Timbuktu or Gao."


Aid distribution site Konna, Mali
Credit: ICRC

Teams of relief workers from the ICRC and the Mali Red Cross have handed out jerrycans and water purification tablets to almost 5,400 displaced persons in Tinzawatene. They are also repairing wells in the Akharabane and Achibriche areas, which are also near to the Algerian border, where there has been an influx of displaced persons. The situation is particularly worrying because residents are having to share their meagre resources with the newcomers.

L’OIM au secours de migrants tchadiens en détresse expulsés de Libye

Par l´Organisation Internationale pour les migrations (OIM)

Tchad – L’OIM a distribué de la nourriture, de l’eau et des médicaments à un groupe de 32 migrants tchadiens arrivés la semaine dernière au bureau de l’OIM à Faya-Largeau, dans une région reculée au nord du Tchad, après avoir été expulsés de Libye.

Credit: OIM

Depuis juillet dernier, trois groupes de migrants tchadiens ont été expulsés de Libye. Plus de 150 000 travailleurs migrants tchadiens avaient déjà quitté le pays en 2011, après le renversement du régime précédent.

Epuisés et malades, les membres du groupe, tous des hommes, ont expliqué à l’OIM qu’ils travaillaient dans différents endroits en Libye, occupant généralement des emplois temporaires peu et non qualifiés. Ils ont dit qu’ils avaient été détenus, et certains ont affirmé avoir été maltraités.

Ils ont déclaré que par le passé, en tant que ressortissants tchadiens, ils n’avaient pas besoin de documents pour vivre en Libye. Mais, aujourd’hui, les autorités libyennes ont commencé à exiger des documents et ont fermé les frontières avec le Tchad, le Niger et le Soudan. La plupart des membres du groupe ont été arrêtés parce qu’ils n’avaient pas de permis de travail.

Mahamat Zene Issa a raconté à l’OIM qu’avant le déclenchement de la crise, il vivait depuis cinq ans avec sa famille, composée de trois personnes, à Sebha, une ville au sud de la Libye. Sa famille avait pu rentrer au Tchad avec un convoi d’évacuation de l’OIM, mais lui a décidé de rester en Libye pour continuer à y travailler.