Africans Against Hunger and Diseases AAHDs

    The outlook for West Africa’s hunger crisis in 2013 has improved in some parts of the region compared to 2012 when 18 million people were at risk of hunger. But 2013 started with a warning from a UN official that more than 10 million people across the region are still at risk of starvation, including 1.4 million children facing severe acute malnutrition. Experts say food crises like those in 2005, 2010 and 2012 indicate an underlying trend for increasing chronic vulnerability. So why are so many people in the region frequently locked in a hunger crisis? Failed harvests Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger are among the poorest countries in the world, where most of the population rely on the land to make a living and to put food on the table. So when inadequate rains at the end of 2011 led to poor harvests in many staple crops, such as millet, it was bad news for millions. Livestock too took a significant hit and pastoralists suffered as well. Eve...

    The outlook for West Africa’s hunger crisis in 2013 has improved in some parts of the region compared to 2012 when 18 million people were at risk of hunger. But 2013 started with a warning from a UN official that more than 10 million people across the region are still at risk of starvation, including 1.4 million children facing severe acute malnutrition. Experts say food crises like those in 2005, 2010 and 2012 indicate an underlying trend for increasing chronic vulnerability. So why are so many people in the region frequently locked in a hunger crisis? Failed harvests Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger are among the poorest countries in the world, where most of the population rely on the land to make a living and to put food on the table. So when inadequate rains at the end of 2011 led to poor harvests in many staple crops, such as millet, it was bad news for millions. Livestock too took a significant hit and pastoralists suffered as well. Eve...

Flying into Monguno, a recently "liberated" town in a forgotten corner of a forgotten state in northeastern Nigeria, all you can see is a vast expanse of nothingness. There is no horizon, just a haze of sand whipped up by the hot, harmattan winds blowing from the Sahara Desert. No green, except for the curious mossy splotches where groundwater rises to the surface. All else is dust. The only signs of farms are the faint outlines of what were once fields etched into the desiccated land. Every so often the charred remnants of a village come into view. This is what scorched earth looks like, a legacy of more than 8 years of terror by the extremist group Boko Haram, which, until recently, held the region in a vice. The world began to wake up to the full horror of that legacy last year, as the Nigerian army started ousting the insurgents from their strongholds here in Borno and the two adjoining states of Yobe and Adamawa. As survivors began straggling out, the few humanitarian...