The dark continent

It's amazing the extent of bad news that Africa is generating at the moment. The current "highlights" include:

1. Zimbabwe is on "the brink of collapse" (so they say; unfortunately, the government has hovering on the brink for an awfully long time). Cholera is the latest misery being added to the appalling government generated problems:

About 6,000 people have contracted cholera in recent weeks, according to the UN, and almost 300 have died. A chronic shortage of medicine has sent hundreds of people south to seek treatment in South Africa....

In the meantime, the economy has disintegrated and the health system is close to breakdown. Four big hospitals, including two in Harare, have effectively closed their doors to new patients owing to a shortage of basic supplies and running water

2. Ethiopia. Foreign Correspondent tonight had a story on famine in Ethiopia. (The video is not up on the website yet, but should be by the end of the week.)

It was odd to see that the countryside looked incredibly green and lush after recent rains, but apparently the failure of last year's crops still means there is not enough food now. The population was said to be about 80 million, which was much higher than I would have guessed.

The story was also noteworthy for showing up the questionable reliability of World Vision. The journalist visited a 14 year old girl that he had been sponsoring for years. It appeared that she had been barely aware that she was being sponsored until recently, when she was given a jacket and a pen. Certainly, the feedback that World Vision supplies as to what the sponsored child is doing (learning english, for example) does not appear reliable.

World Vision apparently said that the sponsorship money goes to community projects that benefit the children, but it was not clear in this story what they may have done for this child's community. It was not a good look, and World Vision will certainly be hoping that this does not get much coverage.

While watching undernourished people living in the lush green countryside, it was hard to avoid the thought that this was a country that really needed help with developing modern, efficient farming. According to Wikipedia, the problems range from the small farm size, to some of the farm practices:

Since the land holdings are so small, farmers cannot allow the land to lie fallow, which reduces soil fertility.^[114] This land degradation reduces the production of fodder for livestock, which causes low amounts of milk production.^[115] Since the community burns livestock manure as fuel, rather than plowing the nutrients back into the land, the crop production is reduced.^[116] The low productivity of agriculture leads to inadequate incomes for farmers, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These unhealthy farmers have a hard time working the land and the productivity drops further.

These are problems that are in principle solvable, but it would seem none of the necessary reform is happening.

3. Somalia continues to be pirate capital. The Economist paints this grim picture:

With no proper government since 1991, it has been a bloody kaleidoscope of competing clans and fiefs. More than 1m, in a population once around 10m, have fled abroad; this year alone, the UN reckons, some 160,000 have been uprooted from Mogadishu, the capital, which has lost about two-thirds of its inhabitants over the years. The country is too dangerous for foreign charities, diplomats or journalists to function there permanently. Thousands of angry, rootless, young Somalis are proving vulnerable to the attractions of fundamentalist Islam in the guise of al-Qaeda and similar jihadist brands. The cash from piracy is probably fuelling the violence.

4. The Congo. I am currently reading "Congo Journey" by Redmond O'Hanlon, about his mid 1990's trip into the Congo. (Currently this is available as a $10 "Popular Penguin" edition in Australia.)

The corrupt, dangerous place that O'Hanlon writes about is in an even worse state now. In May this year, The Economist wrote about widespread use of rape as a weapon of war, and now the 17,000 strong UN peace keeping force needs re-enforcements that it is unlikely to get, and there is talk the place looks primed for a Rwandan style genocide.

What a depressing continent.

UPDATE: In an effort to be more upbeat, people could do worse, I suspect, than to donate to Catholic Relief Services, which appears to do a lot of work in Africa. It may just be my bias, of course, but I suspect that Catholic agencies would be pretty credible in the efficiency with which donations are used.

Out of curiosity, I just did a search for Islamic charities, and turned up Islamic Relief Worldwide, which currently features on its front page a graphic headed "donate now" that points out that "The practice of sacrificing an animal at Eid ul Adha acts as a reminder of the Prophet Ibrahim's obedience to Allah". Hmm.

UPDATE II: the BBC has this recent feature on the problem with foreign aid for Africa.