Food Aid Resources Mapped in Western
Districts of Lesotho Affected by Drought.
AidforAid has successfully completed
its first project in a developing country, having deployed a team of 11
volunteers to Lesotho during September 2003. The team conducted a survey
and mapping project there for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
The small but mountainous Kingdom of Lesotho is suffering from widespread food insecurity, affecting possibly one in four of the population. The problem is acute in the western districts of the country, where winter crops have failed and the effects of HIV/AIDS have diminished the population's ability to cope, which has led to extreme hardship across a wide area.
WFP and the Lesotho Government distribute food aid via village primary schools, clinics and other distribution points many of which are in inaccessible locations. This distribution system in the western districts has never been mapped, limiting the effectiveness of delivery planning and post-distribution monitoring. Over the course of little more than one week, the AidforAid team located all distribution nodes on the ground, captured their co-ordinates using Global Positioning System (GPS) and imported the data into a Geographical Information System (GIS) for ongoing use by WFP and other agencies.
The expedition was led by David Spackman, AidforAid's operations director, who commented: "Our first project delivered real value by helping humanitarian agencies on the ground to enhance their service delivery by giving them access to high quality spatial information. This is exactly what AidforAid was set up to do. I was delighted by the performance of the team, all of them volunteers, in the field and I have strong confidence in our capability to respond to emergencies in other parts of the world with similar effectiveness."
For more information about AidforAid please see www.aidforaid.org.uk