Disaster

By Jeff Power, GHNI Kenya Field Director & US Partner Development Director

What if you tried to help a poor village get water, and bankrupted it in the process?

It happens. And it’s not good.

And that’s why we visited one of Africa’s top windpump companies today here in Kenya. Because wind is free.

22 February 2012 - In 2011, pirates made some $170 million in ransom money for hijacked vessels and their crews. That figure represents an increase since 2010, when ransoms paid amounted to over $110 million, according to UNODC.

Ransom money is increasingly flowing into the legal financial system, while the laundering of the proceeds of piracy is causing consumer prices to rise steeply in the Horn of Africa and the surrounding area.

As the world wonders how to put Somalia on an even keel, there are warnings that outside interference could make things worse

Read the full article in the Guardian.

The past few months have been truly grim for mother-of-three Suldana Ali, pictured above, but new hope has given her a reason to smile again.

After enduring hunger and desperate need, Suldana is now able to look after her family due to the work of a Tearfund partner.

The 27-year-old fled her native Somalia because of the drought that has inflicted terrible hunger on her community. She ended up in a makeshift home in a camp outside the town of Dhobley on the Kenya/Somalia border.

In Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide’s charity work includes a programme that informs women about ways to prevent childhood malnutrition.

Essential actions

Abdullahi Sheikh Ahmed, an elder in Tabda, southern Somalia, is still bitter about a time, not long ago, when al-Shabab militants choked off the only supply routes to the town, a common strategy of the Islamist group to tax people in areas under their control.

"When they blocked people and vehicles and they were not bringing us anything," he said, "as a group of elders we requested how to meet the Shabab representatives in the area, we were begging them for a couple of days to allow us to bring a single donkey cart of food."