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Sri Lanka's 'forgotten' city poor need help too
02 Jul 2009 15:11:00 GMT
Author: Amjad Mohamed-Saleem

Over the last couple of months, my aid worker colleagues and I have been so engrossed in the humanitarian crisis affecting war-ravaged Sri Lanka that nothing else seems as important. It is all too easy to get caught up in the immediate disaster, overlooking equally pressing needs.

Sri Lanka's urban poor - or the "forgotten people", as I have called them in a previous blog - are equally deserving of our attention. Yet they get a fraction of our attention in normal times, and during emergencies, none at all.

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Liberia: One week in Grand Walking County
01 Jul 2009 15:04:00 GMT
Author: Merlin

Pam Gordon is the assistant to Merlin's Operations Coordinator in Liberia. She is a Canadian working for Merlin, the international medical aid agency, in post-conflict West Africa. Normally based in the capital Monrovia, she joined a week-long Merlin assessment to the remote county of Grand Kru, close to the border with Ivory Coast. Pam visited clinics that have never received international aid and are so inaccessible the Liberian government struggles to get vital drugs and staff to the area. Here is what she found in the rural heart of Liberia

Dickson is both our skilled driver and passionate professor as we explore his home county of Grand Kru. Steering the Land Cruiser carefully over the broken bridges and muddy roads of southeast Liberia, he is eager to express his views on the complex history of this remote, abandoned area. Over hours of bumpy kilometres, listening to looped tracks of Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, Dickson tells stories of Liberia's 14-year war that ended in 2003.

The scars of conflict are still easy to spot, from empty schools to fallow fields, but Dickson points out others that I don't notice from the backseat of the car. The beautiful grass plains, he says, used to be full of cows, until a corrupt government official had thousands slaughtered so that she could easily land her private plane. Dickson also reminds me that ex-combatants from the war's many factions are not just the muscular men that intimidate the streets of Monrovia. They are also the teenagers (children during the war); mothers who've been raped; and fathers forced to fight to feed their families.

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Homeless in the mountains of Pakistan
19 Jun 2009 12:39:00 GMT
Author: Mustafa Qadri

The Pakistan Army is in the middle of its largest ever operations against Taliban forces in the troubled region bordering Afghanistan. Up to 2.5 million are believed to have fled the once quiet, scenic mountain ranges. At a camp in Risalpur, 50 miles south of some of the fiercest battle zones in the Swat valley, I talked to schoolgirl Mannu.

Among the bare dwellings of Risalpur's industrial area, buildings donated to the displaced by local businessmen that have been transformed into miniature cities, I met eleven-year-old Mannu, a fearless young student unfazed by the traumas that have, for the time being at least, destroyed her ancient village community.

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Saving the lives of African children by waiving health care payments
19 Jun 2009 11:24:00 GMT
Author: George Fominyen

Child-sensitive social protection is of critical importance in West and Central Africa: it has the highest regional under-five mortality rate in the world at 169 per 1,000 live births and accounts for more than 30 percent of global maternal deaths, according to UNICEF.

A policy brief released this week on the Day of the African Child by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London highlights that financial constraints are a key reason preventing children and women from getting better access to health care in a context of widespread poverty.

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