This is the reality of hunger in the Sahel region of West Africa, where more than 10 million people are now in the grip of a food crisis triggered, in part, by patchy rainfall last year thatled to a plunge in the production of cereals. In Chad alone, the cereal harvest fell by 34 percent. And pasture—critical for the well-being of the region’s livestock on which many families depend for food and income—is severely lacking because of the poor rains.
But the increasing intensity of seasonal droughts is not the only source of the problem. A lack of investment in agriculture and herding, and insecure land tenure also play a role in the suffering some of the world’s poorest people endure.
In Niger, where the crisis stalks more than seven million people, the country’s youngest children are among the hardest hit. IRIN, the UN news agency, reported in late June that acute malnutrition rates among children younger than five in Niger had spiked 42 percent higher than they were this time a year ago—to nearly 17 percent. That means almost half a million children are acutely malnourished, according to IRIN. Many others—almost half of Niger’s children—live with chronic undernourishment, said IRIN.
Other countries are affected by the food crisis, too: Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, and northern Nigeria.
Early warning systems revealed last fall that the Sahel was headed toward trouble, but the alarms failed to rouse a robust regional and international response. The amount of emergency assistance has, so far, been insufficient to meet the large-scale needs of the region. The West Africa consolidated appeal—a joint humanitarian fund-raising effort by groups working in the region, including the UN—is only 36 percent funded. The appeal includes support for food security activities in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania. About $69 million is needed to respond to the emergency in Niger alone. In Chad, the World Food Program needs almost $20 million to respond to rising food needs.
With the next harvest months away, and the approaching rainy season threatening to impede delivery of assistance to more remote areas, concerns of farmers like Fadoul Acheul are growing more acute. He is a 53-year-old father of eight children living on the outskirts of Mongo in Chad and has run out of options that could help tide his family over.
“The mango trees haven’t borne fruit this year, so we can’t sell those,” he said in April. “Also, there isn’t enough water to maintain our family orchard.” The family had used up its store of cereal a month earlier and was relying only on the income Fadoul’s wife made by selling a few items in the market.
The day Fadoul lamented his dry orchard was the day he had to make a decision—the same one many families now confront: selling their livestock. To get food, Fadoul sold his last ram, fetching just enough money to keep his family going for another week.
“Five years ago, the world ignored the warning signs from Niger, failed to act rapidly, and lives were lost,” said Mamadou Biteye, an Oxfam regional director in West Africa. “The international community cannot make the same mistake and again condemn many children to an early death.”
Oxfam has launched an emergency program to provide support to 800,000 people across Niger, Mali, and Chad. In Niger, the organization is helping 400,000 people by distributing food and supplies to the poorest households. Oxfam is also buying weak livestock at above-market rates to help herders who need to sell some of their animals. Meat from the livestock is being distributed to some of the most vulnerable households. In Mali, the organization will help 200,000 people by distributing food as well as fodder for livestock. And in Chad, distributions of food and seeds are accompanying agriculture support projects, with a goal of helping 200,000 people.
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“The destruction across the capital was stunning, and the sight of countless camps crowded with families gave me a powerful sense of how devastating this earthquake has been for people,” says Oxfam writer Coco McCabe, who recently returned to Boston from Haiti.
The camps are spontaneous, makeshift neighborhoods, marked out by plastic tarps, cardboard, and bed sheets strung between whatever’s there. Posts to hang materials on are in short supply, so people are scavenging wood from the wreckage of buildings.
“I saw one man with a flat, wide board, working hard with a small hand saw to cut the board into narrower pieces that could serve as poles for sheets, plastic, scraps of clothing—anything that might offer the semblance of a wall or roof to give families privacy,” says McCabe.
Plastic sheeting strung from poles may seem like a minimal shelter solution, and it is. But at this moment in the emergency, it’s something that works. Colored tarps keep off the sun and rain and, unlike tents, can be made to fit whatever space and terrain is available – or whatever other purpose they’re needed for on a given day.
Over the next two months, Oxfam aims to boost the supply of sturdy plastic sheeting, providing enough for at least 4,000 families (20,000 people) – a project that includes a cash-for-work component: we are employing local people to cut giant rolls of the material down to size. Families will get two pieces, each six meters by four meters, along with two 10-meter lengths of rope.
Meanwhile, we’re making plans to assemble and distribute home-repair kits to help those whose houses need patching up, not rebuilding.
But when it comes to figuring out if what’s left of your house is a danger to your family, no one should have to rely on guesswork. Oxfam will assemble a team of structural engineers to survey the damage to homes in Haiti and share their knowledge and suggestions with local residents, builders, and officials.
How long will it take for survivors of the quake to make their way from camp sites to temporary houses to real, permanent homes? For many, it will be years. But if donors continue to support the aid effort generously, Haitians will get the support they need every step of the way.
“Building back all that was lost in just a few seconds,” says McCabe, “is going to require a sustained commitment from us all.”
Oxfam intends to ensure that the people who were most severely affected by the earthquake have clean water and basic sanitation services. The agency will prioritize this support by serving cities and new camps to be set up outside Port-au-Prince, as well as medical facilities.
Working with community members and local authorities, Oxfam will provide support and equipment to help clean up solid waste and develop a long-term approach for solid waste management.
International standards for emergency shelter require 17.5 square meters of shelter space for a family of five; most families in Port-au-Prince are living in one-third that area. Oxfam will work with local partners to provide safe temporary shelter materials such as plastic sheeting, and help construct temporary housing. Initial plans are to distribute plastic sheeting to about 4,000 families (about 20,000 people) in February and March. In addition, Oxfam will distribute roughly 1,000 tents, and home repair kits to owners of damaged buildings that can be repaired.
Food is becoming increasingly available in affected areas. But survivors don’t always have any money to purchase the food. Oxfam is starting a cash-for-work program that will target particularly vulnerable survivors including women, support alternatives to food aid, and promote purchase of food produced in Haiti.
To promote availability of local food, Oxfam is working with farmers affected by the earthquake to stimulate local agricultural production.
To encourage involvement of civil society organizations in decisions about the initial relief and recovery process, Oxfam will help Haitian organizations recover from the earthquake and assert some control over how the government and international donors design and carry out the rebuilding of Haiti. This will help ensure that the billions that will be spent in Haiti will actually help the poorest communities recover from the earthquake. This will help build a Haiti that is stronger than it was before the quake.
Every project to rebuild homes, rehabilitate water systems, and help people get back to work will also include measures to reduce vulnerability to floods and earthquakes. This will help communities become more resilient in future calamities.
Ongoing assessments by staff working in earthquake-affected areas will help Oxfam refine this initial strategy for the reconstruction and long-term development phases of Oxfam’s post- earthquake assistance to Haiti.
]]>" All people who are professionals in our area, in our organizations…the country has lost a group of key people that could help for development and of course thousands of children, women, men…but mainly women and children are the worst affected. Our people are now sleeping in the street. The government, even people from the international community in Haiti and of course poor people, we are all living outdoors in the streets.
“We are not just talking about the disaster affecting the country’s institutions…it affects the government, civil society and the international community.
"Our coordination with the international community is still working. Our concern now is not the size of aid coming to Haiti, it’s how to get adequate people and resources to manage it. How to get the aid in place and to manage it. It needs to be done quickly.
“My colleague [incoming country director, Claude St Pierre] was coming to Haiti to replace me and we were trying to ensure a smooth transition. He had just arrived in Haiti that afternoon and came to our office to say hello and to be introduced to staff. Unfortunately, we were in the door of my office saying hello when the earthquake started. We stayed hugging each other for that entire minute. Of course, since I have worked in emergencies, I understood it was an earthquake, but I have never experienced an earthquake of this magnitude.”
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During earthquakes, like the one that rocked the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, water systems, with their extensive network of pipes and pumps, often collapse. Repairs can take time—time that people who depend on that water to stay alive don’t have.
Without water, people can’t last much beyond three days. That’s why Oxfam focuses much of its emergency response on rushing to provide survivors with a safe supply.
With years of experience responding to emergencies around the world, Oxfam’s water engineers know how to build temporary systems with speed and efficiency so that people can get the water they need. Oxfam trucks water into remote regions, drills for it through desert floors regions, erects massive storage tanks, hauls in generators, repairs pumps, lays temporary water lines, and hands out plastic buckets so people can tote water back to their homes.
And there’s an internationally accepted standard of delivery Oxfam strives to maintain in every crisis. It calls for providing survivors with about four gallons of water per person per day—an amount intended to cover just essential needs.
Here are some of the critical components of an effective emergency water system:
Sanitation
Ensuring that disaster survivors living in camp conditions have safe ways to dispose of waste is crucial to helping them live in a healthy and dignified environment, so creating latrines is a key element of Oxfam’s humanitarian programming.
As quickly as possible after an emergency, we begin constructing simple latrines consisting of holes or trenches in the ground surrounded by light structures of poles and plastic sheeting to provide privacy. As soon as we have the time and resources to do it, we add concrete slabs to stand on to make the latrines cleaner and easier to use.
Oxfam also builds bathing facilities that are designed to be safe and private.
Oxfam makes sure that the displaced communities themselves are involved in the construction and maintenance of their sanitation structures, and in order to help ensure that women and girls feel safe using these communal facilities, we take care that women in particular are involved in decision-making about their location, design, and construction.
]]>There are places in the world where it is a simple fact of life, but Darfur isn’t one of them. Under the blazing desert sun, the fact of life is thirst, and finding clean water is anything but simple. In a region plagued by conflict and banditry, trekking to a source of water can be dangerous - matched only by the risk of drinking what you find there.
So when Oxfam Great Britain (OGB) and 15 other aid providers were expelled from Darfur in March of 2009, everyone braced for the worst. Without agencies providing engineers to ensure the flow of water to the camps, fuel to run the generators, and public health workers to supply critical materials and information, the risk of disease epidemics was very real.
But in emergencies, it is never wise to underestimate the power of communities.
In North Darfur, the community committees and leaders who had worked closely with Oxfam were able to quickly take charge of the diminishing water supply, supervising and protecting the facilities until outside help arrived.*
And the public health volunteers didn’t miss a beat. “When an epidemic happens...it will not stop,” says one. As stocks of hygiene supplies dwindled, she and others did what they still could do. “We did not stop guiding and working with our people. We never stopped raising awareness about health.”
Meanwhile, Oxfam shifted gears. As OGB exited the region, Oxfam America – one of the few international agencies permitted to remain in Darfur - prepared for a massive scale-up. Soon Oxfam was again supplying water, sanitation facilities, and hygiene programs and materials to more than 235,000 people in the camps of North Darfur and was moving quickly to expand its programs to South Darfur.
The armed conflict has taken its toll on survivors. Faces there are etched with grief, loss, and fear, and the tone of the camps is grave. But on the subject of clean water, sometimes a note of satisfaction or even happiness creeps in.
“The clean water we get is what we want for eating, for drinking, for bathing, for washing, for taking care of our children,” says a resident of Kebkabiya, where an Oxfam partner has taken charge of the water supply. “Because it’s clean water, we don’t have diseases or health problems. Isn’t it good!”
As the crisis in Darfur falls off the headlines yet stretches on with no end in sight, the Oxfam taps convey more than water; they carry a heartfelt message from the outside world: We have not forgotten you.
Donate now to the Sudan Crisis Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.
* In the interim between the exit of Oxfam Great Britain and the launch of the Oxfam America water and sanitation programs, a Sudanese government agency supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was able to step in temporarily to fill some of the needs, such as fuel for generators.
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