Africa News blog

Emerging donors chip away at aid industry’s status quo

By Alex Whiting

Jan 26 (AlertNet) – Where most expat aid workers fear to tread in Mogadishu, recently arrived Turkish aid workers have been driving in the streets, swimming in the sea and praying in local mosques.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan visited Somalia in August, the first head of a non-African state to do so for nearly 20 years. The Turks have since opened an embassy, started work on the international airport, offered Somalis university places in Turkey and made plans to build a new hospital.

“Turkey is an animating force in Somalia … The people honestly love them,” said Mustakim Waid, who worked in Mogadishu for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — the second-largest intergovernmental organisation after the United Nations.

From Turkey to Brazil, India to Saudi Arabia, a growing number of non-Western donors are bringing fresh funds, a different mindset and their own experience of managing natural disasters to the global humanitarian aid scene.

Until recently most emerging donors focused their aid on their own regions. Some, like India, China and Brazil, were also major recipients of international humanitarian aid.

Update on the refugee camp that now lives in the sky

Screen grab of the introduction to the online game "The City That Shouldn't Exist"

A few months ago I wrote a story about a controversial online game posted on Facebook called the “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” that was consequently pulled off the Web days after its launch amid claims it objectified refugees and lacked sensitivity.

The game developed by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) with funding from ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian agency, and designed to raise awareness of Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenyan-Somali border, is now back online but with some noticeable changes.

Some features have been removed such as Mr. ECHO’s lover calling him “my hero” as he leaps out of bed on hearing an emergency siren go off. That was deemed too cheesy. You can still rescue or “drag and drop” your refugees as you do your supplies but instead of them walking towards a pile of bones, now they just walk towards a hole.

“My refugees were dying like flies because I couldn’t work out how to drag’n'drop supplies. Haven’t felt so stressed since I worked for ECHO!” posted Marianne Farrar-Hockley on the Facebook page hosting the game.

PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive

I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she’d grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy – probably the same age as me at the time – who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.

To this day, I’ll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne – she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.

Fabianne’s childhood was brutally stolen from her and it got me thinking about how quickly so many young people in places like Africa, Asia and the Americas have to grow up, forced to fend for themselves through child labour or prostitution, denied an education and exposed to violence, disease and hunger at an age when they should be learning and playing.

Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live in poverty and experience violence annually, UNICEF figures show, meaning nearly half the children in the world don’t get to have childhoods. There are also an estimated 132 million orphans in the world, UNICEF says.

Children under 18 make up almost half of Haiti’s 9-million population and the country faces the highest rates of infant and child mortality in the Western hemisphere.

Officials fear thousands of children have been separated from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by child traffickers, being illegally adopted by other countries or forced into child labour in order to survive. Around 150 million children worldwide aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour.