Djibouti News Gazette

GENEVA — In marking the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, the United Nations is calling for better land management and regreening initiatives to tackle the twin disasters.

Europe is struggling with an unusually early and intense heat wave, which has spread from North Africa. That has been preceded by a prolonged heat wave in India and Pakistan in March and April.

Spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization, Clare Nullis, said European countries are experiencing scorching temperatures in mid-June that are more typical of those in July or August. She added that temperatures more than 10 degrees higher than average are combined with drought in many parts of Europe.

“As a result of climate change, heat waves are starting earlier. They are becoming more frequent and more severe because of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which are at record level,” Nullis said. “What we are witnessing today is, unfortunately, a foretaste of the future.”

Heat waves can exacerbate drought and wildfires, and trigger desertification. Droughts are increasing in frequency and severity, the WMO says, adding that they have gone up by 29 percent since 2000, affecting 55 million people a year.

The World Health Organization calls drought an urgent, global issue. It says droughts are getting more frequent and fiercer in all regions, affecting the health and well-being of millions of people. WHO spokeswoman Carla Drysdale said a particularly hard-hit region is the greater Horn of Africa.

“In the past 10 years, the region has endured three severe droughts,” Drysdale said. “The frequency and severity of droughts in recent years, linked to the changing climate, has made it harder and harder for families to recover from these shocks. … Millions in the greater Horn of Africa are facing acute hunger.”

U.N. agencies agree early action can avert a crisis, lessen the impact of drought, and reverse desertification. They say measures such as rainwater harvesting, drip irrigation systems, and crop engineering that increases resilience to dry conditions can ward off some of the worst effects of drought.

They recommend better land management, tree planting and other regreening projects to combat desertification and restore the land to what it was. They also point to the Great Green Wall of the Sahel project in Africa, which has restored millions of hectares of land and created thousands of jobs, from Dakar, Senegal, to Djibouti.

Source: Voice Of America

Everyday scores of stranded and vulnerable migrants make their way to any one of 12 Migration Response Centres (MRCs) in the East and Horn of Africa with the intention of accessing various services, including medical attention and information.

The MRCs are all situated along key migration routes and are run by governments and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) with support from programmes such as the EU-IOM Joint Initiative for Migrant Protection and Reintegration in the Horn of Africa (the EU-IOM Joint Initiative).

Due to the thousands of migration movements recorded in the region annually, there is need for MRCs to play an even greater role in supporting migrants in distress, according to an assessment conducted by Altai Consulting supported under the EU-IOM Joint Initiative. Among those who participated in the research were partner agencies, including governmental bodies.

MRCs have been credited with providing life-saving assistance, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when movement restrictions and border closures left many more migrants stranded and in need of support.

The numbers and locations of the MRCs are as follows:

Djibouti (1), at Obock

Ethiopia (5), at Dire Dawa, Metema, Moyale, Semera and Togochale

Somalia (3), at Bossaso, Hargeisa and Mogadishu

Sudan (3), at Gedarif, Kassala and Khartoum

“Across all locations, MRC stakeholders and partners perceive the MRC as one of the most relevant actors in the field of migration management,” the report said. “The MRC is seen as the institution that holds the knowledge required by everyone else active in migration and that can bring all the stakeholders together to improve the migration management response in the region.”

The suggestion is for MRCs to leverage their role as a coordinating body and to provide support in areas like training and information-sharing in migrant protection, migrants’ rights, human trafficking and gender-based violence.

Deeper collaboration would benefit from the establishment of a structured communication and an electronic referral mechanism. Just as important would be supporting partners with infrastructure renovations, such as the work done with migrant community schools in Sudan.

Similarly, there is need to boost shelter capacity in safehouses. This is necessitated by the fact that migrants currently spend prolonged time in transit. In Ethiopia this is partly due to the temporary restrictions of assisted voluntary returns to the northern parts of the country.

Direct Support

Other ways of improving collaboration between MRCs and government stakeholders would include the strengthening of coordination mechanisms across the various MRC partners, together with participating in established coordination platforms such as Hargeisa’s mixed migration management taskforce meetings.

In turn, government stakeholders can support MRC operations by availing staff, including social workers, as well as focusing their extensive reach to identify migrants in vulnerable situations while also providing direct support to migrant groups.

IOM teams supporting the MRCs strive to continue providing quick and efficient service to the migrants who need it. This is despite that migrants reported being satisfied with the services provided by MRCs, especially free medical assistance.

Accessible Feedback

Two percent of respondents reported being very satisfied, 76 percent were satisfied, 20 percent were neutral and 2 percent were dissatisfied. The highest level of satisfaction was among beneficiaries between the ages of 11 and 17. However, migrants singled out the need to speed up turnaround in assisted voluntary return and reintegration support, followed by more and better food.

The research findings also pointed to the benefit of having an official and easily accessible feedback and complaint mechanisms at the MRCs. Beneficiaries polled said they were most comfortable sharing feedback or a complaint by addressing it directly to an MRC staff member (55%), followed by calling the hotline (29%), where one existed.

About the EU-IOM Joint Initiative

Launched in December 2016 and funded by the European Union (EU) Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, the programme brings together 26 African countries of the Sahel and Lake Chad region, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa, the EU, and IOM around the goal of ensuring migration is safer, more informed and better governed for both migrants and their communities.

Source: International Organization for Migration

Cameroon and the Central African Republic have agreed to demarcate several hundred kilometers of their shared border. The countries have have competing claims to villages and towns along the porous, undefined border. The two sides also vowed joint efforts to stop violence along the border, where Central African rebels have been hiding and launching raids for supplies.
Defense ministers and police chiefs from Cameroon and the Central African Republic agreed Wednesday to demarcate their shared border through a joint commission.
The C.A.R.’s minister of territorial administration, decentralization and local development, Bruno Yapande, led his country’s delegation to the three-day talks in Yaounde.
Yapande said both sides want to demarcate and develop the border to improve security and living conditions for civilians.
Yapande says the presidents of the two countries have promised that the demarcation of the border will begin within a month to make border towns and villages safe from violence.
He adds that the two countries also agreed to reinforce their joint military presence in border towns and villages.
Cameroon shares a close to 900-kilometer, mostly porous border with the Central African Republic.
C.A.R. rebels use the bush around the border to hide from both sides’ troops and to launch raids on nearby villages for supplies.
The governor of Cameroon’s East region, Gregoire Mvongo, attended the meetings.
He says a 1908 accord supervised by German and French colonial masters defines the Cameroon-C.A.R. border. Unfortunately, says Mvongo, people, erosion, and floods since have destroyed many boundary markers. He says Cameroon and the C.A.R. neglected to maintain border markers as they were focused on fighting C.A.R. rebels since the C.A.R. gained independence from France in 1960.
Mvongo said the C.A.R. has not gone 10 years without political tensions boiling over into bloody conflict.
The two sides this month announced that 2,500 of 300,000 Central African refugees who fled conflict to Cameroon would return home by the end of the year.
The refugees agreed to return home after Bangui promised peace had returned to their towns and villages.
Mvongo noted there are disputes over territory along the border that need to be resolved.
The C.A.R. claims some border areas that are currently inside Cameroon, including a market in Garoua Boulay town and parts of border villages.
Cameroon authorities say there have been several confrontations with Central African troops in disputed territories since 2016, though none have led to fighting.
Jeannette Marcelle Gotchanga, a member of the C.A.R. border commission, says if the border demarcation is immediate, as recommended by the African Union, it will put an end to tensions and rivalries that impede free movement of people and goods and slow economic growth in villages where the border is disputed.
Neither country has said when the demarcation project will end but agreed to respect the findings of the joint demarcation commission.

 

Source: Voice of America