By Jennifer Lazuta Many families in Guinea still rely on streams and lakes for their water needs.DAKAR, 15 June 2015 (IRIN) – It is a cruel irony that many of the top doctors and nurses in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone will not be around to help rebuild their health systems in the wake of Ebola, having succumbed themselves to the virus. For those that are, the biggest challenges are likely to be electricity, sanitation, and, most of all, water.“How is it possible to build, or rebuild, as you may call it, a health institution or hospital without [access to]…
Author: ARIN News
A family sits outside destroyed homes in Accra’s Nima neighbourhood, a few days after heavy rains flooded the city on 3 June. ACCRA, 12 June 2015 (IRIN) – Years of delays and repeated failures to implement and improve sewage and drainage systems in Ghana’s capital, Accra, has led to increasingly damaging and deadly flooding during the country’s annual rainy season. “[Ghana] hasn’t make any serious arrangements in the event of a flood,” said Franklin Cudjoe, director of the Accra-based IMANI think tank. “It is the epitome of neglect.”Thirty-eight-year-old Gertrude Otobia Darko was at home with her eight children and husband on…
By Mamoudou Lamine Kane Khalifa Ould Mohamed Lemine, who fled to Mauritania from his home in northern Mali, sells candy and cookies each week at the local Mberra market, not far from the refugee camp. NOUAKCHOTT, 10 June 2015 (IRIN) – More than 50,000 Malians have taken refuge across the border at the M’berra camp in southeastern Mauritania since fighting broke out in northern Mali in 2012. Despite long-standing tensions between many of the different ethnic groups in Mali’s North, people are coming together at a local weekly market. Click here to see IRIN’s photo feature on how the refugees are not…
Security and humanitarian priorities – out of kilter?NAIROBI, 5 June 2015 (IRIN) – The Nigerian government’s focus on its war against the Boko Haram insurgency is obscuring a growing humanitarian emergency.The violence has driven at least 1.5 million people from their homes in the three conflict-affected northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe. The vast majority have been taken in by friends and relatives in the main cities, but the hospitality has imposed a significant burden on their hosts.“People are stressed. People are tired. Things are very difficult,” said Mustapha Zannah, a lawyer in the region’s largest city Maiduguri who…
Nigerian troops in the northeast – how not to win hearts-and-mindsNAIROBI, 3 June 2015 (IRIN) – An Amnesty International report accusing the Nigerian military of the murder of thousands, and demanding the investigation of senior commanders for war crimes, has been welcomed by Nigerian pro-democracy activists. “Stars on their shoulders. Blood on their hands: War crimes committed by the Nigerian military,” says more than 7,000 young men and boys were starved, suffocated and tortured to death in military detention from 2011 in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency. The report, based on hundreds of interviews and leaked military documents, said since…
By Jennifer Lazuta and Lassana Cassama Will Ebola protection outfits soon be seen on the streets of Bissau?DAKAR/BISSAU, 2 June 2015 (IRIN) – The government of Guinea-Bissau has known for months about the risk of Ebola entering the country, but it hasn’t done enough to prepare. Now there is a cluster of cases just across the border. Residents say it will be good fortune rather than good planning if an outbreak is avoided. “I don’t know why we haven’t gotten Ebola yet,” said Edimar Nhaga, who lives in the capital, Bissau. “It certainly isn’t because of prevention measures taken by…
A displaced woman sets up camp in Mali’s Timbuktu regionBAMAKO, 29 May 2015 (IRIN) – A spike in violence in northern Mali has driven the number of people displaced in the country above 100,000, many of them urgently needing food, water and shelter as time runs out before the rainy season begins. The situation is worst in the northern Timbuktu region, where an estimated 23,000 people have been driven from their homes in only a few days, fleeing a marked upsurge in attacks by rebel coalitions and government-controlled militias. Many key players were absent from a peace signing ceremony in…
By Mamoudou Lamine Kane and Jennifer Lazuta Carcasses dot the sandy landscape in southern Mauritania’s Hodh El Chargui region, where a lack of rain has affected both wild vegetation growth and crops. NOUAKCHOTT, 26 May 2015 (IRIN) – Hundreds of thousands of Mauritanians are struggling to feed themselves as they fall victim to the effects of climate change. A chronically hungry country, Mauritania could see the availability of food drop to its lowest level in years if drought continues to ravage crops, livestock and livelihoods. An estimated 1.3 million people will face food insecurity this year, according to the latest…
By Alexis Adele The Holding and Corrections Prison of Abidjan (MACA) is home to more than 6,000 inmates, many of them children.ABIDJAN, 21 May 2015 (IRIN) – Hundreds of children are being kept behind bars in Cote d’Ivoire’s overcrowded adult prisons waiting on trial dates due to the country’s broken post-crisis criminal justice system. According to Ivorian law, the accused have 15 days to be charged before a judge, but this deadline is rarely enforced and many accused – among them young teenagers – are left on remand for months on end. Fifteen-year-old Brahima Keita* (not his real name) has…
Nine-year old Amin working on his family farm in northern Cameroon’s Mayo-Sava district.MAROUA, 19 May 2015 (IRIN) – It’s becoming more and more difficult to find food in Cameroon’s Far North region, residents say, not only because the annual lean season is underway, but insecurity caused by Boko Haram has severely disrupted farming and cross-border trade. As many as 180,000 people in the region could be at risk of an acute food crisis this year, aid agencies and local authorities warn. The malnutrition rate among children under five, which has been above the World Health Organization’s emergency threshold of 15…
By Brahima Ouedraogo As many as 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients in Burkina Faso are at risk of losing food aid, which they rely on to keep them healthy while taking life-prolonging ARV drugs. OUAGADOUGOU, 14 May 2015 (IRIN) – For years you couldn’t tell if someone in Burkina Faso had HIV/AIDS just by looking at them. Now it’s getting easier again because cuts in food assistance are depriving them of nutrition, AIDS advocates say. Some 12,000 HIV/AIDS patients who rely on food aid are at risk of food insecurity and health problems this year if programmes don’t receive the required level…
By Jennifer Lazuta Children wash their hands before entering a classroom in GueckedouGUECKEDOU, 13 May 2015 (IRIN) – “Life is back to normal, but everything has changed,” said 30-year-old Yawa Keterine Camara as she slowly stirred a boiling cauldron of sauce outside her mud-brick home in southeastern Guinea. “I live again like before, but nothing is quite the same.”Camara, who lost her husband to Ebola in November, said her life, like many, many other Guineans, is now divided in two: pre-Ebola and post-Ebola, the before and after.“Sometimes it seems impossible that we are still here, still doing what we did…
By Jennifer Lazuta Patients receive treatment at Gueckedou’s busy hospitalGUECKEDOU, 8 May 2015 (IRIN) – Until Ebola, the main hospital in Gueckedou was often deserted. Now, on a Saturday afternoon, the place is bustling. Doctors and nurses move efficiently from patient to patient. Families sit on straw mats beside the beds of their loved ones, talking quietly as they wait.“Before, the service was empty,” Doctor N’Fansoumane Kalissa, the hospital director, told IRIN. “The sick didn’t come…They saw traditional healers or were treating themselves. But people have started coming here because they know Ebola was real and that even though Ebola…
Many children in Freetown who should be in school are notFREETOWN, 6 May 2015 (IRIN) – Fear and poverty are keeping many children in Sierra Leone out of classrooms and on the streets hawking or labouring– another effect of the Ebola outbreak that kept schools closed for nine months. Four weeks into a new term, a third of the seats in Freetown’s Kroo Bay Community Primary School are still empty. “Most [parents] complain that they don’t have the money to send kids to school. There are many challenges in the school and the community. Kids have a lot of fear,”…
By Karim Camara and Jennifer Lazuta Guineans vote in the capital Conakry in the 2010 presidential electionCONAKRY, 5 May 2015 (IRIN) – There appears to be little appetite for the Guinean opposition’s promised campaign of civil disobedience. However, deep-rooted ethnic tensions, suspicions over Ebola and simmering resentment for the security forces could still see pre-election protests boil over.Opposition-led demonstrations have turned increasingly violent over the past month. Hundreds of protestors have been arrested. The opposition says at least two have been killed, scores more injured. “I’m really afraid,” Ibrahima Bah, a taxi driver in the capital Conakry, told IRIN. “People…
IRIN’s West Africa editor Jennifer Lazuta recently spent eight days in Guinea, travelling in and around the town of Gueckedou in the heart of the country’s Forest Region, where the Ebola outbreak is believed to have begun in December 2013. She shares some impressions from the field. By Jennifer Lazuta A billboard exhorts citizens to handwash with soapGUECKEDOU, Guinea, 1 May 2015 (IRIN) – The first thing that struck me on flying into Guinea wasn’t so much the pervasive hand-washing stations or constant temperature-taking. It wasn’t the giant billboards scattered throughout the city proclaiming “STOP EBOLA” in multiple languages. And…
Tuareg rebelsBAMAKO, 30 April 2015 (IRIN) – The last few years in Mali have been busy: an independence declaration, a coup, a mutiny, a northern takeover by Islamist groups, a French military intervention, a hostage crisis, a guerrilla campaign, a preliminary peace deal, and finally, in February, a ceasefire.Given all the turmoil, it is little surprise the last two entries – the peace deal and the ceasefire – are now under grave threat.Tuareg rebels have long fought for independence, or at least greater autonomy, for the large part of northern Mali they call Azawad. The rebels are dragging their feet…
By Jennifer Lazuta A child receives a shot of measles vaccineGUECKEDOU, 29 April 2015 (IRIN) – The odds were stacked against Guinea’s vaccination teams. The initial side effects of the measles vaccine can easily be mistaken for the first symptoms of hemorraghic fever and a false rumour had spread blaming the distribution of deworming pills in late 2013 for bringing Ebola into the country. But thanks to an exhaustive door-to-door effort, promoting the benefits of the vaccine and dispelling myths about Ebola, nearly 100,000 children between the ages of six months and 10 years in Guinea’s southeastern Gueckedou region are now…
Follow @{0}More than 100 aid workers were killed or injured by improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2014.DUBAI, 17 April 2015 (IRIN) – Welcome to IRIN’s weekly assortment of journalism and research about the humanitarian world that piqued our interest.Five to read: There can never be a humanitarian component to military action Stephen Cornish, executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Canada, calls into question the practice of mixing military and humanitarian missions. “There is simply no compatibility between humanitarian action and the use of military force in combat,” he says. “One has as its singular objective the…
WEIRD whichever way you look at itBELGRADE, 15 April 2015 (IRIN) – I’m WEIRD. I’m not sure whether I became an aid worker because I’m weird, but I was definitely a WEIRD aid worker. I realised this after reading a 2010 academic article which pointed out that an overwhelming proportion of psychology experiments were carried out on an “extraordinarily restricted sample” of humanity – American university undergraduates. The article concluded that this sample was “one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens,” because they were too WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.That seemed credible to…