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Largely Driven by Climate Crisis, 9 Out of 10 Least-Reported Humanitarian Crises of 2019 Were in Africa
"Does a crisis really happen if it is not in the headlines? YES."
Jan 27, 2020
Out of the top 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises in the world last year--many of them climate-related--nine were on the African continent, according to a new report.
Madagascar had the least-reported crisis in the study--entitled "Suffering in Silence" (pdf)--released Tuesday by CARE International, as 2.6 million people in the country are affected by chronic drought which has left more than 900,000 in immediate need of food assistance.
\u201cDoes a crisis really happen if it is not in the headlines? \ud83d\udcf0\n\nYES. In 2019, over 50 million people suffered in silence \ud83c\udf0d\n\nCARE\u2019s new global report on the 10 most underreported #humanitarian crises of 2019 >> https://t.co/Ob8so9i96Y\n\n#SufferingInSilence #ForgottenCrisis\u201d— CARE International (@CARE International) 1580204238
Out of 24 million online media articles examined by CARE International, just 612 reports were about the humanitarian emergency in Madagascar--and the country was just the most extreme example of the international community's neglect of the world's second-most populous continent.
"In 2019, over 51 million people suffered in 10 crises away from the public eye," the report reads. "Although for the average person on earth, life is better today than ever before, around 2% of the global population (160 million people) will require $28.8 billion in humanitarian assistance to survive. This is a fivefold increase of needs since 2007."
With 80% of Madagascar's population engaged in agriculture, the climate crisis and resulting drought has caused damage to many families' livelihoods. The food shortages brought on by chronic drought conditions also led to Madagascar having the fourth-highest rate of malnutrition in the world, making it easier for diseases like measles to infect over 100,000 people in 2019.
\u201cThe hunger crisis in #Madagascar is completely off the media radar. \n\nYet over 916,000 people are in need of food aid. \n\n#SufferingInSilence REPORT >> https://t.co/Ob8so9i96Y\n\n#ForgottenCrisis @CAREMadagascar\u201d— CARE International (@CARE International) 1580207400
CARE International noted that millions of people in Africa are "suffering in silence" even as the climate crisis gains more international attention, thanks to grassroots climate activists like Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, and students all over the world--including across Africa--who have led climate marches over the past year.
"It is shocking to see how little media reporting there is about human suffering related to global warming in the South, the lack of political action to address this injustice, and solutions applied to ease the burden for communities."
--Sally Austin, CARE International"The increased public attention for the global climate crisis is encouraging, but we must ensure that the conversation is not limited to the Global North and much-needed transformations there," said Sally Austin, head of emergency operations for CARE International. "It is shocking to see how little media reporting there is about human suffering related to global warming in the South, the lack of political action to address this injustice, and solutions applied to ease the burden for communities."
Other crises in Africa that have been intensified by the climate crisis include Zambia's droughts, which left 2.3 million people in need of food assistance, and a mix of extreme drought and flooding in Kenya.
In southern Africa, where Zambia lies, temperatures are rising at two times the global rate. The pattern has contributed to a sharp drop in wheat and maize crops as well as in safe drinking water in much of the country.
\u201cHungry and forgotten: In Zambia, over 40 % of children under the age of five are stunted. \n\nRT to break the silence. \n\n#SufferingInSilence REPORT >> https://t.co/Ob8so9zJYw\n#ForgottenCrisis \n@care_zambia\u201d— CARE International (@CARE International) 1580215500
Daily life for many in Zambia illustrates what climate leaders mean when they warn that people in frontline communities--who have contributed the least to the climate crisis--are suffering the most.
"The drought has placed additional hardships and risks on women as they cope with the changing climate," the report reads. "For example, some women now report waking up as early as 3:00 am in order to be the first to collect the scarce water available and then spend all day searching for food. Many have resorted to collecting whatever wild fruits they can find to feed their families."
In Kenya, rainfall in 2019 was at least 20% below average, and as CARE International says, "When there is not too little rainfall, there is far too much."
"Heavy rains displaced tens of thousands of people during the fall months and destroyed farmland and livestock," the report reads. "This worsened an already dire food situation in the country."
\u201cA paradise for tourists, but also a forgotten crisis. Weather extremes put people on the edge of survival in #Kenya. \n\nOver 500,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition.\n\n#SufferingInSilence REPORT >> https://t.co/Ob8so9zJYw #ForgottenCrisis\u201d— CARE International (@CARE International) 1580225400
North Korea is the only country on CARE's list that isn't in Africa; other under-reported emergencies are taking place in Eritrea, Central African Republic, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and the countries of the Lake Chad Basin--made up of Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon.
None of the countries on the list were covered in more than about 9,000 media articles all over the world throughout 2019.
Armed conflicts are major drivers of humanitarian crises in several African countries. CARE's report notes that the climate crisis is worsening political and economic instability across the continent.
"We're seeing increasing linkages between the effects of man-made climate change and the longevity and complexity of humanitarian crises," said Austin. "From Madagascar to Lake Chad to North Korea, the majority of crises ranked in our report are partly a consequence of declining natural resources, increasing extreme weather events and global warming more broadly."
The report notes that three of the least-reported crises in the world are also on the United Nations' list of the least-funded international emergencies.
With this in mind, CARE says, media outlets and humanitarian groups can help to close the gaps by considering "reporting as a form of aid."
"Crises that are neglected are also often the most underfunded and protracted," the report reads. "With close links between public awareness and funding, it needs to be acknowledged that generating attention is a form of aid in itself. As such, humanitarian funding should include budget lines to raise public awareness, particularly in low-profile countries."
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Stopping the Violence in Burundi
With the recent mass political unrest and failed military coup against Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza--after he announced his run for an extraconstitutional third term--the African Union along with the United Nations appealed for ethnic harmony there. This addressed fears that weeks of political unrest could prompt another round of fight between Hutus and Tutsis in the center of Africa's Great Lakes region.
May 31, 2015
With the recent mass political unrest and failed military coup against Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza--after he announced his run for an extraconstitutional third term--the African Union along with the United Nations appealed for ethnic harmony there. This addressed fears that weeks of political unrest could prompt another round of fight between Hutus and Tutsis in the center of Africa's Great Lakes region.
The conflict started April 26 after Burundi's Constitutional Court ruled in support of President's Nkurunziza's decision to overrule Burundi's constitution and stand for a third term. There were reports that judges were intimidated. As a result of the upheaval, tens of thousands fled the country.
His critics say Nkurunziza's attempt to defy the constitution endanger a peace deal brokered to keep ethnic tensions in check since the end of the civil war in 2005. The bloody conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi since have all but disappeared, although political parties still have distinctly ethnic features. The president is Hutu, most of the opposition leaders are Tutsis, and they have seized on the ethnic divisions and distorted them into something far more complex.
Burundi emerged from a brutal civil war a decade ago but according to United Nations there are fears that the crisis right now could reignite the frictions that existed during the civil war. Burundi has experienced 40 years of armed violence and civil war since gaining independence from Belgium in 1962. The United Nations along with Amnesty International estimated that 300,000 people died in the conflict in Burundi, which has the same ethnic mixture as neighboring Rwanda, where 800,000, most of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in a 1994 genocide. It's clear that political instability and deep rooted unresolved grievances continue to threaten inter-ethnic cooperation and security in the country and the Great Lakes in general.
So what is behind the current political instability in Burundi? Even though the conflict is based on President Nkurunziza's decision to campaign for a third term, the conflict has an economic dimension. Many Tutsis argue about the lack of access to job opportunities and resources, and their grievances cut across the ethnic divide. It's well documented that unequal distribution of resources perpetuates dominance and creates violence as seen in many African conflicts. Wars arise from distributional conflict; achieving political stability will require the establishment of institutional mechanisms that correct the legacy of inequality, and afford parity access to economic and political power across the ethnic groups in Burundi.
Failure to find solutions to Burundi's political instability will have devastating social, political, and economic effects on the Great Lakes region, an area that is already worn out by conflict and poverty despite--some say because of--an abundance of valuable natural resources.
There is, indeed, reason for seeing Burundi as a catastrophe in the making. It has a vicious cycle of intergroup violence, with militias pre-empting politics and crowds of refugees on the move. The conflict in Burundi could metastasize to other areas of the Great Lakes, which could throw the entire region into danger yet again.
The African Union, in concert with the United Nations, must spearhead solid multilateral conflict resolution mechanisms to avoid the spillover effects. If not, ethnic conflicts are contagious in the Great Lakes and can rampage virally across borders.
In light of this conflict, I hope that the international community will increase its efforts to avert disaster in Burundi. Already the EU has pulled election observers and the Catholic Church has announced it will not assist, as it usually does, in organizing and monitoring the election. Leaders in the Great Lakes region should take a hard look at their actions and policy choices. Emphasis here should be on discouraging corruption, embracing ethnic harmony, transparency, and good governance.
It is therefore important that if President Pierre Nkurunziza is serious about building peace, he must stop repression of opposition figures and tolerate dissent--or he should face serious personal economic, social, and travel sanctions from the international community. He must also implement constructive methods of handling ethnic differences, engineer institutions that uproot the legacy of discrimination and promote equal opportunity for social mobility for all members of Burundi's ethnic groups. The UN and African Union stand ready to help.
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Who's Afraid of African Democracy?
May 25, 2015
Poor Burundi. Landlocked, tiny, and known mainly for ethnic conflict, it was for years the subject of one of the most intense international peace-building efforts in history. By the time the Arusha Peace Agreement was finally signed in 2003, 300,000 Burundians had died in a civil war rivaling in ferocity that of its neighbor Rwanda. Huge sums had been invested in grassroots workshops, high-level meetings and summits to end the fighting. According to Burundi specialist Peter Uvin, taxi drivers in the capital Bujumbura joke that the per diems received during these protracted negotiations built the poshest neighborhood in the city. Now, a decade after the peace process came to what seemed a successful conclusion, and despite billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, the country appears to be falling apart again.
In April, President Pierre Nkurunziza, in power since 2005, announced he'd be running for a third term in elections scheduled for June. Opposition supporters, church leaders, student and civil society groups, much of the international community, and even many in Nkurunziza's own party say this violates the Arusha agreement, which limits a president to two terms in office. They also accuse Nkurunziza--a former warlord who became a born-again Christian and travels with his own Hallelujah football club and choir--of presiding over a regime of corruption remarkable even by East African standards. Many also claim President Nkurunziza has condoned politically motivated killings of opposition figures and provided tacit government support to an armed militia known as Imbonerakure, which could be deployed to intimidate voters during the election.
Thousands of Burundians took to the streets in mid-April to protest Nkurunziza's plans to run for office again. Hundreds were arrested and perhaps twenty--the number is disputed--were killed. Security forces were split, with some in the army on the side of the people. On May 13, a group of army officers led by former intelligence chief Godefroid Niyombare announced they'd ousted Nkurunziza, to much rejoicing in Bujumbura. Nkurunziza was in Tanzania discussing the crisis with other African leaders, but he quickly snuck back across the border where he was met by his own forces and retook the capital a couple of days later.
Niyombare is said to be on the run, and most of his fellow coup plotters have been arrested. Three who were wounded were subsequently shot in their hospital beds by men in police uniforms as horrified nurses, doctors, and other patients looked on. An estimated hundred thousand refugees have fled to neighboring countries. The protestors are continuing their demonstrations, while Nkurunziza seems determined to go ahead with his plans to stand for reelection. On Wednesday, Radio France Internationale reported that police in Bujumbura had cordoned off an entire neighborhood and were shooting at anti-third term activists among their homes.
What makes events in this tiny country so important, and so heartbreaking, is that they are part of a recent pattern that actually seemed hopeful. When protest movements swept across the Middle East region--in Iran in 2009 and then in the Arab Spring countries--they didn't stop at the Sahara desert. In their new book Africa Uprising, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly document more than ninety political protests in forty African countries in the past decade--most in the past six years. Many have had the same aim as those in the Middle East: to force corrupt leaders out of power.
Some have been encouraging: after Senegal's Constitutional Court ruled--under duress, some say--that President Abdoulaye Wade could run for what many maintained was an unconstitutional third term in the 2012 elections, people poured onto the streets in outrage. Police in riot gear fired tear gas and rubber bullets, and a handful of protesters were killed. But the country's citizens got their point across. Wade lost the election and conceded defeat.
There's also cautious optimism about Burkina Faso. When President Blaise Compaore tried to strongarm the National Assembly into removing term limits so he could contest the 2015 election, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in front of the building while some forced their way in. He was deposed in October 2014, and an interim military council is now organizing elections to take place later this year. And when demonstrators in the Democratic Republic of Congo took to the streets of Kinshasa in January, they managed to halt President Joseph Kabila's attempt to alter the constitution, which would have extended his term beyond its end date of 2016.
Attempts at tyrant-removal are unlikely to end anytime soon. Over two dozen African countries are headed for elections in the next two years, including Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and other countries whose leaders have signaled an intention to remain in office no matter what. Protest movements in some of these countries are gathering force, and army commanders are quietly choosing sides between the autocrats and the people.
Why do so many African leaders assume they can ignore their constitutions, cling to power, and get away with it?
In order to understand this epidemic of folly, it's important to appreciate how much influence the West has over these countries--either through foreign aid given bilaterally, via institutions such as the World Bank, or in the form of clandestine military support. For example, Western aid pays for half of Burundi's budget, roughly 40 percent of Rwanda's, 50 percent of Ethiopia's and 30 percent of Uganda's . All these countries receive an unknown amount of military aid as well. This money enables African leaders to ignore the demands of their own people, and facilitates the financing of the patronage systems and security machinery that keeps them in power.
The problems started with the debt crisis in the 1970s. African countries that had borrowed and spent lavishly in the years following independence found themselves unable to repay the commercial banks that had lent them money. The Western nations, via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, took over and restructured these loans, but demanded large public spending cuts. Huge numbers of teachers, nurses, doctors, and other public servants lost their jobs; programs to expand health care and education, improve roads and bring water and electricity to rural areas ground to a halt; poverty deepened; infant mortality rose.
In many cases, the new austerity programs, intended to lead to more efficient government, instead encouraged unprecedented corruption. Those who managed to hold on to government and civil service jobs scrambled to grab whatever they could for themselves and their increasingly dependent extended families. This patronage system helped control dissent, as many African leaders used what Cameroonians term "the politics of the belly"--bribery--to compromise their critics and coopt opposition groups. But it also led to deteriorating public services, as I documented in Uganda, where the maternal mortality rate in the largest referral hospital had increased seven-fold since the days of Idi Amin, according to a World Bank consultant who had worked there in the 1970s.
The continent's foreign aid donors were not oblivious to these problems. They knew that this new loan regime, known as Structural Adjustment, would hurt huge numbers of people. For example, in a notorious 1981 World Bank report about the program , the authors acknowledge that some reforms would be resisted by "consumers and producers, parastatal managers, civil servants and industrialists,"--meaning just about everybody in the nations involved. The state had to be "willing to take strong action on internal problems," the report continued. As Branch and Mampilly note, many African scholars interpreted this as tacit donor permission for repression in countries receiving loans. This would be consistent with the donors' tendency to look the other way when Adjustment-friendly leaders--like Burkina Faso's Compaore, Cote D'Ivoire's Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Uganda's Museveni and Kenya's Daniel Arap Moi--jailed, murdered, or exiled their critics. The donors' tolerance for human rights abuses may help explain why, when ethnic discrimination and repression escalated into genocide, as it did in Rwanda and Burundi, the international community did nothing until it was far too late.
Another reason so many African leaders feel they can afford to ignore their own people has to do with America's "War on Terror." During the 1990s, the Clinton administration began securing military ties with African leaders who seemed willing to cooperate in the fight against what Clinton officials saw as the rising threat of Islamic militancy on the continent. These ties have only grown in the years after September 11. According to journalist Nick Turse, the US military has sponsored more than one thousand African missions since 2011, with countries such as Nkurunziza's Burundi, along with Rwanda, Ethiopia, Chad, and Uganda, deploying troops and guards across Africa and the Middle East at America's behest. The primary purpose of this seems to be to monitor and prevent the emergence of terrorist groups in weak states. But it's no coincidence that the US's military allies in Africa have often used security forces against their own critics at home. As the events in Burundi suggest, providing support to ugly regimes may ultimately undermine the very stability we are supposedly seeking.
Now, fed up with decades of lies, plunder and abuse, Africans across the continent are finally rising up to challenge these Western-backed thugs. Some have been inspired by protests elsewhere in the world; some are united in new ways by Facebook, Twitter, and chat programs. Foreign aid has also brought thousands of NGOs into Africa. Not all are effective, but their American and European employees and volunteers have, naively or not, exposed African people to liberal Western attitudes and ideals of human rights as never before.
Branch and Mampilly lament that whereas past African protest movements had clear ideologies, like Independence, African Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, the only thing today's protesters appear to want is the removal of the current leadership of their countries. But this lack of a grand objective may not be such a bad thing, as long as whoever takes over pursues a modest program of obeying the rule of law, eschewing corruption and respecting human rights. This is why this spring's election in Nigeria, in which incumbent Goodluck Jonathan graciously conceded defeat, was so welcome. Some opposition supporters had threatened violence if it felt the election was rigged, but this proved unnecessary. Though Nigeria's new leader, former General Muhammadu Buhari, behaved like a tyrant when he briefly ruled the country between 1983 and 1985, he also cracked down on corruption. For two years, Nigerians formed orderly lines at bus stops, the streets were clean, and politicians didn't steal. Many Nigerians, exasperated with their supremely corrupt country, are hoping for a spell of modest probity, as long as Buhari honors his promise to respect human rights this time. If we're seeing the dawn of a new movement, let's forgive it for lacking a glamorous label. Right now, it's the best hope this beleaguered continent has.
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