Oxfam Horn, East and Central Africa Blog

In Ethiopia, hindsight and education

Demitu Germessa weeds her field to try and put her children through school

“An uneducated person means a blind person,” says Hussein Kedir who, with his wife, is working hard to make sure their children have a chance to go to school. Coco McCabe reports from central Ethiopia:

Demitu Gurmessa and her husband, Hussein Kedir, are sitting on a long wooden bench in the dirt yard outside their home in Jello Dida—a community in the Shashamene District of Ethiopia. Nestled with them are some of their nine children.

Demitu holds out her hand to me so I can feel her palm—rough with the countless chores required to keep her family fed, housed, and clothed. Hussein holds out his, too. It feels just like his wife’s, a hand toughened by work in the fields. For poor people in Ethiopia, that’s what life is; they are bound to hard physical labor—to plowing and planting patches of earth, to fetching water and firewood, to herding goats, sheep, and cattle. But the couple’s hands are tough for another reason:

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The world must wake up to the situation in Congo

How have we got to a place in the eastern DR Congo where more than 150 women can be gang-raped by rebels in a four-day brutal attack only an hour’s drive from a UN base? It is traumatising simply reading the accounts of what happened to ordinary people in a series of villages in Luvungi at the beginning of the month. The often understandable reaction to such extreme violence is to take a deep breath and shake one’s head in disbelief. The response of all us should be extreme anger and outrage at such atrocities. This is not a one-off event outside of human understanding. Rather, outrageous human rights abuses are a daily reality for many people in eastern Congo, but they are preventable if there were the serious political will to stop them.

Read the rest of Marcel Stoessel‘s blog here in The New Statesman

Inside Story: Sexual violence blights DR Congo

A horrific recent attack on villages in North Kivu has once again thrown the spotlight on the scale of sexual violence in the conflict in eastern Congo.  At least 150 women were systematically raped over four days, according to the International Medical Corps. A small base of UN peacekeepers near the area only found out about the attack over a week after it ended. Oxfam has been campaigning for better protection of civilians - in the short term by peacekeepers and in the long term through badly-needed reform of the Congolese army. Oxfam’s humanitarian policy adviser Maya Mailer was part of a panel on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story this week to discuss the crisis in Congo:

100 days of captivity in Darfur

Today marks the 100^th day of captivity for the Samaritan’s Purse humanitarian worker kidnapped in Darfur. The American woman (her name has not been released for security reasons) was abducted on 18 May while working near Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. Two of her Sudanese colleagues were also taken but released soon afterwards. Oxfam is part of the Northern Sudan NGO Steering Committee, which is holding a special Fatur (to break the daily fast during Ramadan) today to call for her safety, protection and immediate release.

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Ethiopia’s rain a mixed blessing

This time last year, southern Ethiopia battled drought. This year the rain continues to fall, weeks past the normal season. Coco McCabe reports:

A year ago when Oxfam colleagues and I took the long and only road from Ethiopia’s capital—Addis Ababa—toward the country’s southern border with Kenya, the landscape was parched and dusty. The corn had shriveled on its stalks, people fretted about failed harvests, and everywhere water seemed to be in short supply.

But today, as we roll south dodging goats and cattle, waves of green—corn green, teff green, banana green–wash by our car.

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Oxfam staff in southern Sudan celebrate World Humanitarian Day

August 19 marked the second annual World Humanitarian Day, held to raise awareness of humanitarian work across the globe, the challenges aid workers face, and honour those killed, injured or abducted in the course of their work. Abdullah Ampilan, a public health worker in southern Sudan, spoke to Oxfam staff in the small and extremely remote village of Luonyaker:

“I didn’t know that today is World Humanitarian Day because we don’t have radio, TV or newspapers,” says Jackline Akuol Akol, a 20-year old working for Oxfam’s food security project in Luonyaker, southern Sudan.

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Kenyan women march for better healthcare

Kenyan women deliver a petition to Parliament

Hundreds of Kenyan women, including the organisers of the East Africa Caravan for Maternal Health, took to the streets of Nairobi this week to tell Kenyan MPs to keep their promise to invest in healthcare for their citizens. Despite pledging to invest 15 percent of the national budget in improving health services, Kenya currently invests only a dismal 5.5 percent. A petition signed by thousands of women across East Africa was read at the gates of Parliament and received by MP Millie Odhiambo. The campaigners pointed out that Kenya’s brand new constitution, passed just a few weeks ago, now guarantees women the right to reproductive health. To find out more visit the East Africa Caravan Blog. The event is part of an Africa-wide campaign to pressure African leaders to keep to their commitments at the recent AU Summit.

Information for Change: Digital publishing in Africa

In July 2009 the first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa went live. What opportunities does this bring for the way we share and publish information in the region? How can the new technology be used to increase the impact of development work? These are some of the things to be discussed at the annual Information for Change conference, which will for the first time be held in Nairobi, Kenya, on 21 September 2010, under the theme of “Digital Publishing in Africa: The Next Steps”.

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Crisis in Beni – ghost villages and the kindness of strangers

Placide took 30 strangers into his home

Up to 90,000 people have fled their homes over the past few weeks, due to fighting between the Congolese army and ADF-NALU rebels in North Kivu. The ongoing violence across eastern Congo means that people regularly have to escape their villages and search for safety elsewhere. But there are few of the vast tented camps that you usually see in a crisis. Instead, people often find refuge in the homes of strangers. In the most recent fighting the town of Oicha has doubled in size due to thousands of homeless new arrivals. But they have been welcomed by locals like Placide – a part time mechanic who took in 30 people he has never met. “I had a couple of spare rooms, so I couldn’t leave them to spend the night outside,” he says. As many countries take a harder stance on how they treat refugees, the kindness of people like Placide could not be more of a contrast.

Read a new photo story on the crisis in Beni.

The terror of the recent fighting is clear from this short, silent video – an Oxfam team drives along one of the main roads, past mile after mile of completely deserted villages. When people travel in rural Congo one of the first things they notice is the vibrancy and commotion of the communities. One colleague says, “It’s shocking to see the Congolese countryside totally devoid of people, chickens, pots cooking on stoves, colourful dresses, music… they are just ghost villages.”

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The State of the African Union

Too many African governments have not kept their development promises, and there is a vast gap between what is agreed at continental level and what is actually implemented in countries. The new “State of the Union” project aims to hold governments accountable, explains Irungu Houghton.

A few weeks ago I was in Kampala for the 15^th African Union Summit, where Oxfam and partners were campaigning to get our leaders to invest more in healthcare. Heads of State met there for three days – during which time an estimated 40,000 African children and women died, mostly from preventable and treatable illnesses. At the end of the Summit, leaders from across the continent pledged to tackle this crisis and increase healthcare spending, especially for maternal and child health care. It sounds like a great success.

But this promise has been made before. In 2001 AU leaders pledged to invest 15 percent of their budgets in healthcare. Last year only six of the 53 nations had met this target, and most were not even close. The promises made in Kampala will be meaningless if they are discarded as easily as in the past.

So how do we change this? How do we ensure that this time is different?

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