Why some Kenyans are going hungry months after a bumper maize crop | Timothy Njagi Njeru | Why are people going hungry in April after a bumper crop of staple maize was harvested last year? Distribution remains a persistent challenge when it comes to food access in Kenya. There has …
Read More »In southern Madagascar, voters struggle for food before ballot
Amboasary, Madagascar | AFP | One after another, the mothers sat their babies in the shade, on a mat placed on the dusty ground. This morning at least, their children will have enough to eat. In the village of Ifotaka, at the southern tip of Madagascar, the noise and excitement …
Read More »South Africa wine production drying up in water crisis
Paris, France | AFP | South Africa is set for a steep decline in wine production in 2018 as the country grapples with a water crisis ravaging Cape Town and surrounding areas, a Paris-based global organisation said Tuesday. Africa’s top wine producer is set to produce 8.6 million hectolitres of wine …
Read More »Water: Why the taps run dry
Paris, France | AFP | The world has abundant freshwater but it is unevenly distributed and under increasing pressure, UN agencies say, as highlighted by the severe shortages in Cape Town. – Water, water ‘everywhere’ – More than 97 percent of the planet’s water is salty, most of it in …
Read More »Worsening Ethiopian drought threatens to end nomadic lifestyle
Dabafayed, Ethiopia | AFP | Down a sandy track past a desiccated animal carcass lies a cluster of half-built huts that Ethiopia’s government and aid agencies hope will blunt the worsening toll of repeated droughts. The soon-to-be village of Dabafayed is intended as a new, permanent home for once-nomadic herders made …
Read More »Kenyan cattle herders defend ‘necessary’ land invasions
Crocodile Jaw Bridge, Kenya | AFP | Close by a narrow, rickety bridge in Kenya’s central Laikipia highlands two herders sit on blistering hot rock next to the muddy trickle of the Ewaso Nyiro river to explain why they routinely break the law, invading private land to graze their cattle. “The …
Read More »Starvation looms as food runs out in drought-hit Ethiopia
Warder, Ethiopia |Chris Stein, AFP | The Somali people of Ethiopia’s southeast have a name for the drought that has killed livestock, dried up wells and forced hundreds of thousands into camps: sima, which means “equalised”. It’s an appropriate name, they say, because this drought has left no person untouched, …
Read More »IMF revises Uganda GDP growth from 5% to 3.5%
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects Uganda’s gross domestic product growth to record anywhere between 3.5%-4% in FY2016/17, lower than 5% that had earlier been projected. This was announced on Tuesday by Axel Schimmelpfennig, the head of IMF mission that visited Kampala, Uganda from May 2-15, 2017 to conduct the …
Read More »Diarrhoea kills 28 in Somaliland in 10 days
An IRC hospital in Somaliland Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) warned Wednesday of a health crisis in Somaliland after 28 people died of acute diarrhoea in the past 10 days. More than 411 cases, believed to be caused by cholera, have …
Read More »Drought shatters Turkana’s dreams of a better future
Lokamarinyang, Kenya | AFP | In just a few years water, oil and money would flow. Roads, schools and hospitals would follow. Turkana’s generations of poverty and neglect in Kenya’s arid north would end. But it was not to be: five years after the discovery of oil, and four since …
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The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price