Day: December 29, 2021

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Sudan Gunmen Loot UN Food Aid Warehouse in Darfur

KHARTOUM, SUDAN — Sudanese gunmen have looted a World Food Program (WFP) warehouse containing about 1,900 metric tons of food aid in Darfur amid a surge of violence in the western region, officials said Wednesday.

Residents of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, reported heavy gunfire near the warehouse late Tuesday, and the local authorities imposed a nighttime curfew on the town after the attack, state news agency SUNA reported.

“We heard intense gunfire,” local resident Mohamed Salem told AFP.

A WFP official said the organization was “conducting an audit into what was stolen from the warehouse, which contained some 1,900 [metric tons] of food products” intended to be lifesaving supplies for some of the most vulnerable people.

“One in three people in Sudan needs humanitarian assistance,” said Khardiata Lo N’diaye, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. “Humanitarian assistance should never be a target.”

On Twitter, Darfur Governor Mini Minawi denounced the raid as a “barbaric act” and said those responsible “will face justice.”

The vast, arid and impoverished region awash with guns is still reeling from a conflict that broke out under former President Omar al-Bashir in 2003, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead.

While the main conflict in Darfur has subsided under a peace deal struck with key rebel groups last year, violence continues to erupt.

The region has seen a spike in conflict since October triggered by disputes over land, livestock and access to water and grazing, with around 250 people killed in fighting between herders and farmers.

Tens of thousands have been forced to flee their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The violence has occurred while Sudan reels from political turbulence in the wake of a coup led by military chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on October 25.

Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned looting and reported violence near a former U.N. logistics base in El Fasher that had been handed over to the local authorities days earlier.

A joint U.N. and African Union mission, UNAMID, ended 13 years of peacekeeping operations in December last year, but Guterres said “substantial amounts of equipment and supplies” from the looted base were intended to be used by Sudanese communities.

More than 14 million Sudanese will need humanitarian aid next year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the highest level for a decade.

Source: Voice of America

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Ghana’s Coastal Communities Threatened by Erosion, Sand Harvesting

FUVEMEH, GHANA — Tidal waves and coastal erosion have submerged an entire fishing community on Ghana’s eastern coast. Many villagers already had been relocated because of past tidal waves, and they have petitioned the government for a permanent solution.

The RC Primary School lays in ruins after what authorities say in November was the largest tidal wave to ever hit Ghana’s eastern coast.

It was the third re-location of the school farther inland after two previous sites were completely submerged along with the Fuvemeh village fishing community.

Fuvemeh Assistant Head Man Knowledge Dewornu says no matter how many times the villagers move farther from the shore, flooding and coastal erosion have brought it right back.

“So, it started in 1997 and it did not destroy all the land, it destroyed part of it. And in 2016, it also destroyed part of it again, and [in] 2018 it destroyed all the land at Fuvemeh, so you can’t see anybody at Fuvemeh now. So, these are the villages near Fuvemeh, which is now being destroyed by the sea again,” Dewornu expressed.

The once thriving fishing village of 2,500 people has been reduced to a few hundred, who are struggling to keep their heads above water.

A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) study says 37 percent of Ghana’s eastern coastal land was lost by erosion and flooding between 2005 and 2017.

Emmanuel Gemegah, chief executive of the coastal town of Keta, blames rising seas from climate change, as well as human activities, such as building dams and ports and harvesting sand from beaches to sell for use in construction.

“So, as the chairman of the MUSEC, the Municipality Security Council, we held a meeting, and we came out with an order, which seeks to ban the fetching of sand from the beaches until further notice,” he noted.

In a meeting with authorities, Fuvemeh villagers said the ban was not enough.

Seji Saji Amedonu, the deputy director of the National Disaster Management Organization, calls for building a sea defense wall, as has been done on some other areas of the coast.

“The whole shore of Ghana, from Axim to Aflao, that protection needs to be done. Because if we protect one particular place and leave the others, the devastation will continue. But it is capital intensive. We are just hoping that along the line, government will find the money and do this thing and solve the problem completely,” Amedonu pointed out.

While all of coastal West Africa suffers from erosion, Ghanaian experts say their country’s long coastline – almost 550 kilometers – makes it most vulnerable.

The University of Cape Coast’s Center for Coastal Management says Ghana’s shoreline moves inland an average of two meters annually.

Source: Voice of America

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Empowering Women through Education

Education is seen by many as a means of acquiring wealth and social status. It is also perceived as a means of enhancing an individual’s self-esteem and achieving greater social equality. In the past, educating a woman was not as popular as it is now due to cultural barriers.

One of the main reasons young women were forced to abandon their schooling was marriage. For one, teachers and male classmates see girls as mainly interested in getting married even if it means having to drop out of school. And there is also often pressure from parents who want to marry their daughters, especially if they do not do well at school. “We will see her grades and see if she passes the exam. We will do something about her marriage because she doesn’t need any further education after this grade” were common words among the society, especially those that live in rural areas.

What is commonly called ‘shyness’ of girls has also been an obstacle for young females who try to shine out. It finds its manifestation in girls and young women being regarded as almost invisible in the company of males, speaking in a low voice and often only when directly asked. This has made girls to be rarely heard in group discussions in their classes, partly because boys speak louder than girls do, and they hardly ever raise their hands to give answers to questions asked by their teachers. As a result, many girls fail to gain the required knowledge and lose interest in education.

A few years ago, I had no choice but to eavesdrop on what a little girl had to say. She made her way to the kitchen where her mother was. Her loud voice proves how thrilled she was. She grabbed my attention. “To solve a physics problem related to Newton’s laws of motion, my teacher asked me and another outstanding boy in my class. He let us answer the question simultaneously on either side of the blackboard while the rest of the class tried it on their exercise books.” Her mother was doing her work and said chuckling “So?” To be honest, considering her mood, the little girl made me wonder if that was the reason for her excitement. The girl then continued, “That’s not all, mom. I finished earlier than the boy. It happened quite often. I was praised and complimented for my work in front of my classmates. Not only that, my teacher chose me to represent my class in the upcoming general knowledge competition for the school closing ceremony. I feel like the most brilliant student out there, mother.”

Her mom patted her on the shoulder and told her that she was so proud of her. For some reason, I was proud of her, too, because I thought it might indeed be these small successes that over time make a difference and eradicate common attitudes about female inferiority. What the girl felt back then for being rewarded as a good student has really enhanced her confidence. Although when teachers are asked they often pay lip service to the need to engage girls more to build up their confidence, most male teachers used to have the perception that girls would eventually get married and be busy looking after their husbands and kids, so why bother.

Thumbs up for those male teachers who have encouraged and are still encouraging girls to build their confidence through education. Their effort can be the biggest hope for the girls in their classes. The little girl I mentioned is now a smart college student at the medical school thanks to her mom’s and teachers’ support.

The good news is that the perception of women and education is changing in Eritrean society. Women now take up the available opportunities and in doing so help change general attitudes in the wider society, eventually achieving equal status. The medical school graduation held a month ago illustrates that Eritrean female students are taking the opportunities offered in education and turning them to their advantage. More than 50 percent of the students who graduated were female. Indeed, the efforts made by the government and society are paying off, and the future of young girls looks bright.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea

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Low Vaccination Rates a Concern Amid African COVID Surge

Low vaccination rates are of mounting concern amid a new wave of COVID-19 infections in Africa, where nearly 227,000 deaths have been reported, according to the Africa CDC’s COVID-19 dashboard. Only 20 African countries had vaccinated at least 10% of their populations as of mid-December, according to the United Nations.

Vaccine access is a major stumbling block.

Vaccines have been slow to arrive from wealthier countries; when they do, there may not be sufficient infrastructure to support timely distribution. On December 22, Nigeria’s government destroyed more than 1 million doses of donated AstraZeneca vaccine that authorities said could not be used before the expiration date.

Meanwhile, the African Union and its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are pushing efforts to develop vaccine manufacturing on the continent.

But, “even in countries where vaccines are being rolled out, there might be administrative and other obstacles that prevent refugees from being vaccinated,” said Aikaterini Kitidi, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee Agency, or UNHCR.

Some countries “require identity documents, which refugees often do not have,” she added. “Others have set up online [registration] systems that can deter or prevent people without access to the internet or who are not computer literate.”

Awareness

Another challenge is misinformation.

It’s “heavily impacting the vaccination process and hindering people from coming,” said Dr. Martin Kalibuze, who directs the vaccination program in Uvira refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s South Kivu province. “There are a lot of rumors, like ‘people are going to die from vaccination, women are going to turn infertile.'”

Sifa Akimana, a 28-year-old Burundian refugee living in the DRC’s Kavimvira transit center with her two babies, told VOA’s Central Africa service she was opposed to getting inoculated because “I hear from people that if you’re vaccinated, it’s very dangerous. It’s a way to control people’s movements with their detective machines.”

Kalibuze said any vaccination drive first needs a strong awareness campaign to smooth the way.

Priorities

There’s at least one more impediment to COVID vaccination: competing priorities.

Across Africa and elsewhere, especially in zones with displaced people, “ministries of health have so many different crises that they have to tackle that COVID isn’t always on the top of their list,” said Jason Straziuso, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

For instance, he said, they might decide it’s wiser to invest in more mosquito nets to protect against malaria, a historically deadly disease that the WHO estimates killed 627,000 people in 2020 alone, mostly young African children.

The ICRC doesn’t distribute vaccines on its own but instead partners with health ministries and national Red Cross Societies, Straziuso said, noting it depends on those relationships “to move into contested areas and to carry out vaccination campaigns.”

Straziuso said the organization hopes to “do a lot more in 2022” to aid vulnerable people, including refugees and the displaced. “There’s just millions of people who don’t have access to these vaccines,” he said. “So, it’s a slow and long process.”

Source: Voice of America

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Have Refugee Camps Escaped Mass COVID Infections?

Roughly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, no massive outbreaks have been reported in refugee camps to date. Health experts have some theories about why, but they also urge continued wariness against “the very real and present danger of widespread transmission” in camps, as the World Health Organization has cautioned.

The U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, “had been fearing — and preparing for — large outbreaks at refugee camps, which fortunately did not happen,” spokeswoman Aikaterini Kitidi acknowledged in an email exchange with VOA.

“However, this doesn’t mean we are out of the woods yet,” she said. With new variants such as omicron, “which are far more infectious, we may very well see more cases. We must remain vigilant and scale up surveillance and testing, as well as the equitable distribution of vaccines.”

UNHCR estimates that roughly 80 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced by persecution and conflict, with most living in low-resource countries with frail health systems. Millions of them live in camps — some formal, some informal — with limited water and sanitation facilities. They also face overcrowding, making social distancing a challenge.

Yet comparatively few COVID infections have been reported in the camps: 55 Central African refugees tested positive in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, as UNHCR reported in a global COVID-19 response update of December 20.

FILE – People stand in line to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, at the Narok County Referral Hospital, in Narok, Kenya, Dec. 1, 2021.

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Low Vaccination Rates a Concern Amid African COVID Surge

Because of population density, “early on, we were concerned that [COVID-19] transmission would be very high and so would deaths, even with the younger demographics” of refugee camps, said Paul Spiegel, an epidemiologist who directs Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Humanitarian Health. “That hasn’t been the case that we’re aware of — but then data have been very poor.”

Undercounting is a real possibility, Spiegel said. “There could be scenarios where it [COVID] actually has gone through the refugee camps at a high level” but symptoms weren’t severe enough for the infected people to seek care. He added that there hasn’t been enough blood testing “to know the extent that COVID has actually been transmitted in these settings. … It takes a lot of time and money to be able to do this.”

Individual circumstances

Transmission rates ultimately may vary depending on the individual camp or other setting, said Spiegel, a former UNHCR senior official who has responded to crises in the Middle East, parts of Africa and Asia. He was on a team that, early in the pandemic, advised the United Nations, governments and humanitarian groups on best responses.

In early December, Spiegel completed five weeks of touring and assessing health conditions in Afghanistan for the World Health Organization. In that country, he said, only three of 39 facilities intended for treating COVID were functioning; the rest were devoid of supplies or paid staff following the Taliban takeover in August and subsequent sanctions by the United States and other Western allies. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department said it would lift restrictions on some humanitarian aid.

On behalf of UNHCR, Spiegel also is looking at COVID’s impact on two Syrian refugee camps in Jordan: Za’atari, a northern site with nearly 80,000 residents, and Azraq, a northeastern site hosting 38,000. Preliminary data indicate lower rates of infection and death in those two camps than among residents of surrounding areas, he said.

“So why would that be? We have some hypotheses,” Spiegel said, noting that those camps went into lockdown early, restricting refugees to the camp, limiting outsiders’ access, and promoting more handwashing and social distancing. Local and international NGOs sustained their support for the camps, he said, so residents could continue to access health care and food, “even if it’s not enough” to meet their caloric needs. He also noted that people in camps spend a lot of time outside.

Spiegel said he’s involved in additional studies of refugees and host communities in Bangladesh and in three African countries: Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. He said he anticipated their findings to be published in 2022.

Source: Voice of America

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ERITREA: Incredible Tourism Treasure

“This country is really underrated,” a German tourist told my tour guide friend upon seeing the fogy atmosphere around Arbe-Robue, a roadside village about 10 kilometers from Asmara on the way to Massawa. Around the months between November and March, it is a usual scenery while descending to the port city. This is just before finding out about the immensity of the content of the Red Sea and the history it bears.

The Red Sea being the first sea to be discovered by humans, according to archaeological findings, the Eritrean part of the sea, around the Abdur area in particular, is said to be where the first seafaring humans had dwelt. It is also home to several marine species, seaweeds and around 1100 varieties of fish including whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles and others. Out of these abundant species, almost 550 are exclusively found in the Eritrean part of the Red Sea.

Eritrea is endowed with over 1000 kilometers of coastline, which include a variety of seagrass, mangrove trees and coral reefs. The existence of mangrove trees along the coastal area provides a breeding habitat for many bird species such as flamingos and other migratory birds.

The coastline is also home to ecologically and historically significant peninsulas, such as the Buri peninsula, which is one of the most important storehouses of biodiversity and the Dahlak islands, which is very significant home to the spread of the first Arabic cuffic scriptures.

The Eritrean Green Belt found about an hour drive northeast of the capital, contains different kinds of vegetation like huge sycamore trees and animals such as antelopes, gazelles, leopards, panthers, hyenas, baboons and hundreds of spices of birds.

Although farming, drought and war are the main causes for deforestation and the migration of wild animals; with the concerted efforts of the Eritrean wildlife and forestry authority and the government, several species have been returning after Eritrea achieved its independence three decades ago. The reservation of the Green Belt as a national park has played a big part in this particular sector.

The mountainous landscape of most of the southern highland area of the country makes you enjoy cool breeze, with temperate climate in the settlements perched upon descending to the lowlands, which are mainly characterized by warm climate. Seeing is believing, and if you come and experience it first hand, you won’t be wandering why the tourism motto of the Eritrean Tourism Ministry is, “Three seasons in two hours”.

Speaking of the mountains, apart from being a habitat to the growing fauna of the country, they have played a significant role in the armed struggle for the independence of Eritrea. The hundreds of kilometers of trenches that spread from Nakfa served as a stronghold for the EPLF.

Animals such as the elephant, African wild ass, and ostrich are recognized among the large animals in the country. Most of us are not aware that our country contains small animals first described scientifically from Eritrea as long ago as the 1830s such as the Eritrea Clawed Frog and Side-necked Turtle. There is also the Asmara Toad, the only toad in the world with a scientific name that includes the capital city Asmara. Some of these are found nowhere except in Eritrea and thus are National treasures that must be studied and preserved.

When it comes to the marine biodiversity as we have mentioned it earlier, the Red Sea marine biodiversity pans from, the unicellular phytoplankton seedlings to the enormous wales. Over 1000 different species of fish, 250 types of corals are found in the Red Sea. Besides, invertebrates, mollusks and gastropods as well as marine plants, such as the three different types of mangrove trees are among the major resources of the Red Sea. According to studies conducted over the past 25 years of independence, it has been confirmed that the depth of the Eritrean Sea is also a haven to 11 types of sea grass, five types of marine turtles, as well as over 72 different marine bird species. Furthermore, 17 different types of sea cucumber with high economic significance are found in the Red Sea.

What Eritrea has got is nothing short of incredible and a lot of times, we, being inside of it, miss the incredibleness of it and fail to tell the rest of the world how beautiful Eritrea is.

Source: Ministry of Information Eritrea