Word: oxfam
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...warning this week from the British aid group Oxfam that the humanitarian crisis in Somalia is the worst in Africa is not new. Last year, the U.N. called the situation in the Horn of Africa nation the world's worst. But Oxfam's is a much needed reminder of the scale of the catastrophe. One million Somalis are refugees. Two million need food. For most of these, malnutrition rates are beyond the U.N. threshold definition of an emergency. Around 400,000 refugees are in a single sprawling camp at Afgooye outside Mogadishu; 70,000 have arrived in the last month...
...drought and malnutrition are thrusting Somalia towards even greater catastrophe," says Hassan Noor, Oxfam's Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia. "Living conditions in Afgooye are some of the worst I have ever seen. I couldn't see a single shelter fit for human beings, and thousands of people have nothing to sleep under or protect them from the searing heat and heavy rains. I saw sick children lying on the floor with diarrhea and disease. I saw a young girl who had been shot in the head, fleeing with her family. People told me they expect the situation to get even...
...time when Harare cannot supply safe water to its citizens. Had it not been for international relief organizations, many fear, the death toll from the cholera outbreak would have been much higher, perhaps into the tens of thousands. Cholera-related deaths per day have since gone down, but Oxfam's chief executive, Barbara Stocking, believes the crisis has not ended. Said Stocking during a recent visit to Zimbabwe: "We have to expect a cholera epidemic and outbreak to happen again at the end of this year, given that the water and sewage system is not working well...
...jackings, death threats and assaults continue to mount, organizations such as Oxfam and Médicins Sans Frontières have scrambled to tighten their security operations in dangerous missions, by corralling their staff into guarded complexes ringed with barbed wire, for example, and pooling intelligence with other humanitarian groups. Still, the new tactics offer no guarantees against well-armed foes. "The attacks have much more to do with the aid workers' status, rather than because they have assets or cash on hand," says Adele Harmer, research associate for the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI and one of the authors...
...have seen in previous years how some government grants have been given to NGOs with political ties to parties in government," says Hashem Assaf, spokesman for the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, an umbrella group that represents 52 international and national bodies, including Oxfam and Mercy Corps, as well as more than 200 local affiliates. "We, as NGOs, are trying to remain independent." (See TIME's 2005 Persons of the Year: The Good Samaritans...