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Africa Resilience Initiative

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The mission of this working group is to articulate and shape issues of resilience and sustainability on the continent of Africa as they may be implemented as reforms of current policies, as well as contemplate and make recommendations for more extensive critiques and proposals for national, provincial, and local systems transformation, as may be necessary or desirable beyond the scope of traditional reforms being undertaken by the current African national governments and local government proposals in Africa.

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This working group is focused on developing an Africa Resilience Initiative to ensure resilience and sustainability for all Africans.
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Members

Aboubacar Conte admin Anthony bnorton Carrielaj Chisina Kapungu
ChrisAllen craig.sevcik Dr Ojia Adamolekun efrost Elhadj Drame Grace Kim
Hadiatou Balde jranck Kathy Gilbeaux mdmcdonald MDMcDonald_me_com mike kraft
njchapman Norea SmShako TacarraB Tjivekumba Kandjii

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Close Call for Doc PJ in Sudan

By Dr. C. Louis Perrinjaquet - summitdaily.com - January 16, 2012

             

Dr. Craig Perrinjaquet of Breckenridge examines a gun-toting Honduran villager in 2007. In his most recent international medical aid trip to Sudan, Doc PJ had his camera and other belonging confiscated by rebels.  Special to the Daily

Breckenridge doctor returns from war-torn nation

I am a medical doctor based in Breckenridge. I recently returned from a medical mission in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. I spent the month of October volunteering at the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel near the village of Kauda in South Kordofan, Sudan.

I am about the only U.S. citizen to have been in this area in the past six months and can testify to the fact that the aerial bombings of civilians are real. We cared for many men, women and children who were the victims of these senseless attacks. I feel an obligation to share what I saw and urge everyone in the strongest way possible to use whatever means are available through the U.S. government to pressure the rulers of Sudan to stop terrorizing and killing their own people.

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Slow Response to East Africa Famine 'Cost 'Lives'

BBC News - January 18, 2012

       

The US government says 29,000 children under five years old died between May and July 2011

Thousands of needless deaths occurred from famine in East Africa last year because the international community failed to heed early warnings, say two leading British aid organisations.

Oxfam and Save the Children say it took more than six months for aid agencies to act on warnings of imminent famine.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 people have died in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Crowdsourcing Democracy Through Social Media

submitted by Tim Siftar

Georgia Tech

ATLANTA – Oct. 11, 2011 – Today the citizens of Liberia will participate in just their second presidential election since the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 2003, and in such an environment the specter of violence or other unrest is never far away. But what if social media, a Georgia Tech professor is asking, could identify and even help prevent dangerous situations from occurring?

When nearly 40 million Nigerians took to the polls last April to elect a new president, many of them went online to share comments about their chosen candidates on blogs, Twitter or other social media platforms. They also used these new media tools to report what they saw. “Listening” to much of it was Georgia Tech Associate Professor Michael Best, which just might have saved a few lives.

During the election, Best provided technical support for a Nigerian group that wanted to use social media as a means for tracking the election process and identifying any problems that cropped up. Best and his team of researchers designed a social media aggregator tool that could pull content from about 20 different sources (including Twitter) and analyze the data in real time using keywords.

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Solar Brings Clean Water to Madagascar

by Duncan Alfreds - news24.com - August 16, 2011

                          

Tenesol Madagascar provides thermal and photovoltaic solutions.

http://www.tenesol.com/-Tenesol-Madagascar,226-.html

Cape Town - Rural communities in Madagascar are receiving access to safe drinking water and electricity with a solar power project.

"Solar energy is a life-giving technology that can improve the welfare and education of a country's population," said Benoit Rolland, managing director of Tenesol.

Typical of a poor country, the majority of Madagascar's population do not have access to clean drinking water and solar water pumps are an efficient way to ensure that communities get access to water.

Solar pumps have also been installed in Zambia where it has allowed farmers to irrigate land that would otherwise not be able to produce crops.

Cost-effective

Local communities in Madagascar are trained to maintain the solar pumps to ensure that they work optimally.

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Video - Somalia is 'World's Worst Humanitarian Disaster'

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Fears of 'Death on an Epic Scale' in Somalia Crisis

channel4.com - July 14, 2011

An aid worker in Somalia, the centre of the East Africa drought crisis which has hit 12m people, tells Channel 4 News he fears "death on an epic, unimaginable scale" if more is not done.

Jens Opperman, the head of charity Action Against Hunger in Somalia, said the situation is deterioriating and will continue to do so unless there is a significant increase in international support.

"We are witnessing unimaginable human suffering," he told Channel 4 News.

The Horn of Africa's worst drought in 60 years has hit people across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. It has caused perhaps the most serious emergency in Somalia, where hundreds of thousands have become displaced as they desperately seek food and water.

Mr Opperman estimated that 2.8m people in Somalia are in urgent need of life-saving humanitarian assistance. He estimated that one in three children is currently on the brink of starvation.

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Horn of Africa: From One Drought to Another

submitted by George Bressler

guardian.co.uk - July 7, 2011

The problem is not just assessing the size of the current crisis, but also that droughts are an almost annual occurrence.

Every day 1,000 Somalis stream across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, which is full to bursting with 367,000 people and already constitutes the largest refugee settlement in the world. They arrive malnourished and dehydrated but – after a walk lasting weeks – grateful that they have made it to a point where they will get food and water. The exodus is not the only indicator that a major food crisis is brewing in the Horn of Africa after the driest year for 60 years.

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To Make Logging Legal, Liberia Will Give Every Tree a Barcode

submitted by: Albert Gomez

Good - May 23, 2011

The African country of Liberia is blessed with lush rainforests full of pygmy hippos, Diana monkeys, duikers, and lots of valuable trees. But when Charles Taylor started plundering the forests to fund his forces in the country's civil war, the UN placed sanctions on Liberian timber.

Now President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf wants to establish a legitimate timber trade to boost the Liberian economy. To that end, she has signed a deal with the European Union that would require companies bringing Liberian lumber into the EU to have proof that it's legal. To make that possible, every legally harvestable tree and every cut log would have to carry a barcode that makes it traceable. Helveta, a British company that specializes in timber supply chain management, has invented the tracking system.

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Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven

By Saeed Ahmed
CNN

(CNN) -- When Jon Bohmer sat down with his two little girls for a simple project they could work on together, he didn't realize they'd hit upon a solution to one of the world's biggest problems for just $5: A solar-powered oven.

Inventor Jon Bohmer with the oven he has made out of a cardboard box.

The ingeniously simple design uses two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic cover that lets in the sun's rays and traps them.

Zimbabwe: 30 Strains of Cholera

From: "CORE CS Community Listserv"
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 12:57:14 -0500
To:
Subject: Zimbabwe Has Thirty Strains Of Cholera | How cholera inspired my book: the cholera epidemic which swept Britain in the 19th century
From: Campbell, Dan (GH/HIDN/ID) [mailto:dcampbell@usaid.gov]

These and other recent cholera updates can be viewed on the Environmental Health at USAID CholeraGroup
at: http://groups.google.com/group/cholera-control
1 - Zimbabwe Has Thirty Strains Of Cholera

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