africa 6 results

What Next for the African Union in 2012?

As we come ever closer to 2012, I thought I would examine Africa's recent struggles on its path to unity and a more prosperous region. Certainly, with 2011's cataclysmic changes taking place in North Africa, most of the African Union's attention has been heavily turned towards the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Nevertheless, the organisation has not been without its own crises to manage in the sub-Saharan region. ...

“Power the World” Week – Issue #4: African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power

Thanks to this solar panel, Sara Ruto no longer takes a three-hour taxi ride to a town with electricity to recharge her cellphone.

For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market. Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid. Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning. That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches. “My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children. ...

Please Help! Child Survival At Stake In Eastern Africa

UNICEF urgently requires US$31.8 million for the next three months to provide humanitarian support to crisis affected children and women in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti

The Horn of Africa is facing a severe crisis due to the convergent effects of the worst droughts in decades, a sharp rise in food prices, and the persistent effects of armed conflict in Somalia, which has combined to trigger one of the sharpest refugee outflows in a decade to Kenya and Ethiopia. Over ten million people are at high risk including 2.85 million persons in Somalia, 3.2 million in Ethiopia and 3.5 million in Kenya. • Urgent life-saving actions are needed to prevent the deaths of an estimated 480,000 severely malnourished children in drought affected Kenya, Somalia Ethiopia, and Djibouti. A further 1,649,000 children are moderately malnourished. All crisis affected persons are at high risk of disease outbreaks including measles, acute watery diarrhoea and pneumonia • Full funding will ensure that vulnerable women and children will: - receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition through provision of Ready- to-Use-Therapeutic Food at community level or at therapeutic feeding centers - gain access to clean water through the repair of pumping stations, digging of boreholes, chlorination of water sources and water trucking - receive vaccines against measles, polio and other deadly diseases - resume education through temporary learning spaces and school-in-a-box kits Find more information here:UNICEF_Humanitarian_Action_Update_-_Horn_of_Africa_crisis_-_8_July_2011

How can you help?

DONATE HERE(UNICEF) SHARE: 1. Share this article on your social networking profiles and Blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, etc.) 2. I've made/found a few banners you can use for your Blogs and Websites: <a href="http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=7542627"><img alt="" src="http://www.unicef.org/images/hp_banner_horn_africa.gif" title="horncrisis" width="120" height="80" /></a>...

Giving up your child to save her: a tale from Tunisia

Photo (c) Alexis Duclos/UNHCR CHOUCHA CAMP, Tunisia, March 16 (UNHCR) – With smooth features and a calm way about him, Abdullah Omar, 25, comes across as someone accustomed to hard choices. But the decision to send his one-year-old daughter back to war-ravaged Somalia, because he could not afford to support her, was one of the hardest he and his wife Khadija have ever faced. That was five months ago. "There is not a night that goes by when I don't lie awake thinking about my baby and worrying about her," Khadija told me here at the windswept Choucha transit camp just inside Tunisia. For the young Somali couple it was the most challenging in a series of ordeals that they have endured in the four years since they fled Somalia – from a 10-day truck journey with people smugglers across the Sahara to serving time in detention and being hounded by racist thugs in Tripoli....

Kenya’s Permanent Refugees: The Camps that Became Cities

The Dadaab refugee camps in eastern Kenya are huge but they make themselves known slowly. After ...
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