The Caritas Annual Report shows our work in 2012 through five strategic priorities identified during the year: addressing poverty at home and abroad, responding to emergencies, upholding the dignity and rights of indigenous peoples, promoting environmental justice, and connecting effectively with our Catholic community.

Public donations topped $3 million last year, including a record Lent total of more than $900,000. We are grateful for the government’s New Zealand Aid Programme which contributed almost $1 million towards Caritas development and relief programmes.

In focus

• Recent or ongoing harvests are generally contributing to greater food security in most parts of East Africa, West Africa, Central America and Asia while food insecurity levels are reaching their annual peak in Southern Africa.

School meals from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) feed more than 11 million children in Africa each year. One of those children is a teenager called Molly Achieng, a 13-year-old schoolgirl from the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

NAIROBI , 16 septembre 2012 (IRIN) - Le nombre de décès d'enfants âgés de moins de cinq ans est passé d'environ 12 millions en 1990 à 6,9 millions en 2011. Le message, qui a été communiqué dans un rapport récent du Fonds des Nations Unies pour l'enfance (UNICEF), est que grâce à un plus grand engagement des gouvernements et de leurs partenaires pour la survie des enfants, la mortalité infantile continuera de baisser.

FOCUS - MALI, a multi-faceted crisis

ACT

A day in Abala camp (Niger)

A food crisis looming over the most vulnerable families (Chad)

La crise alimentaire menace les familles vulnérables (Tchad)

Urgent action is still needed (Horn of Africa)

The rise of the cash based response (Somalia)

How farmers can double or triple their income (Uganda)

“All rain starts from just one drop” (Sudan)

Kitchen gardening as a source of income and food (CAR)

The first open-defecation free village (South Sudan)

FOREWORD

2011 was an important year for the humanitarian community and for OCHA. There was barely a moment when our community was not faced with a relentless series of natural disasters, political crises and chronic emergencies.

But in the midst of this, we achieved something quite remarkable. At the end of December, humanitarian response partners, UN agencies, NGOs and the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement agreed on a series of reforms that focused on making our response efforts faster and more effective.

Evidence shows that almost one billion people globally suffer from food insecurity, and that around 171 million children under five years old suffer from stunted growth due to undernutrition. As the G8’s previous commitment to food security and nutrition expires this year, Concern Worldwide strongly believes that now is the time to take preventative and long-lasting action that can help to make undernutrition history.

This bulletin covers 68 countries for the period October to December 2011 (Q4-2011). It examines trends in staple food prices, fuel prices, the cost of the basic food basket, terms of trade and consumer price indices (CPI) at country level. This issue also provides an overview of the regions which were mostly affected by the impact of price fluctuations on the cost of the basic food basket through 2011 (see Box 1). Price data are now available at http://foodprices.vam.wfp.org.

Highlights

Global trends

By Dizery Salim

GENEVA, 21 December 2011 – Members of parliament from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Senegal, Uganda and the East African Legislative Assembly came together in Geneva this week to agree on the establishment of a Global Advisory Group for parliamentarians with UNISDR’s Special Adviser on Parliamentarians, Feng Min Kan.