Latest Blogs

As World Refugee Day approaches, Catherine Carter, Save the Children’s Head of Humanitarian Information, reports from the Lebanon/Syria border.

Lebanon is beautiful, dangerous, surprising.

Walking through the high streets in Beirut feels reminiscent of Knightsbridge: expensive shops full of expensive women wearing expensive clothes. Restaurants and bars spill out into the night, filling the warm night air with laughter, music and cigarette smoke. Plastic surgery, perfect make-up and luxury is all around. It feels a world away from the volatile, clash-prone border region with Syria. But it isn’t.

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Since January, thousands of Save the Children supporters have campaigned hard as part of the Enough Food for Everyone IF movement.

Together, we demanded the Prime Minister and his fellow G8 leaders took decisive action on hunger.

You emailed your MPs, signed and shared petitions, and 45,000 of you gathered at the Big IF London rally on Hyde Park on Saturday 8 June.

Now, as the G8 leaders head back to their capitals, it’s time to ask: what did we achieve?

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The crossing point is metres away from where I’m standing and I can see into Syria. Vicious clouds of sand and grit surround us, and the sun is beating down – the average temperature here is 40 degrees. Trucks stream past us, crammed with sacks of food and desperate refugees. There are grey mountains as far as the eye can see – and an incongruous Ferris wheel, part of a long-abandoned children’s park, strangely situated here on this dusty border.

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Two years on: Delivering on the promise of vaccines for all

Two years ago, donors came through with vital commitments to save millions of children’s lives through immunisation. Over US$4.3 billion was pledged at the GAVI Alliance pledging conference to help immunise 250 million children and save nearly 4 million lives.

Save the Children has been monitoring those promises: our briefing last year reported that all donors were on track to fulfilling their commitments, while shedding light on areas requiring further action. More recently we have recognised recognised further commitments made to GAVI.

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War destroys lives. As conflict rages and thousands of people flee their homes, communities are ripped apart, daily life collapses and the most vulnerable are always the hardest hit.

The horrifying truth is that 90% of victims of conflicts are civilians and half of these are children.

Every year, thousands of children die, while many more are injured, orphaned or separated from their family purely because they are growing up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For the girls and boys able to escape the fighting, the catastrophic effects can last a lifetime. All too often, we see children forced to abandon their education as they flee conflict zones, either because they end up in areas without education infrastructure or because the schools they do have access to have been requisitioned for shelter, are vastly oversubscribed or are directly targeted by those involved in the fighting.

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On the one hand, the G8′s latest accountability report, monitoring progress on the 60 development commitments that have been made over the past 11 years, makes impressive reading. According to their self-assessment, good progress has been made on health – the subject of almost one-third of the commitments monitored in the report. On the other hand, despite impressive reductions in maternal and child mortality and deaths from infectious diseases, the G8 has recognised that progress is falling “below expectations”.

Five years on, little progress

Under the 2008 Japanese presidency, the G8 committed “to work towards increasing health workforce coverage to meet the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended target of 2.3 midwives, nurses & doctors per 1,000 people”. Countries falling below this are considered unlikely to be able to meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

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In Dollo Ado they have their own way of telling the time. Getachew (one of our Alternative Basic Education Officers) tells us that while here we should get used to 6am being referred to as 0 o’clock and 6pm as 12. Needless to say there are several mix-ups in the following days concerning arranged meeting times!

It has now just turned 1 (that’s 7am if my explanation above was not very clear) and we are sitting in the home of the Kalif family, who came to Ethiopia from Somalia two years ago to escape the conflict that was tearing their village apart.

Sixteen and head of the family
In charge is Ismail, who at just 16 years old is both the head of the family and wise beyond his years.

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“One morning while I was teaching my class some men came and destroyed everything.

They said that I had to stop teaching or that they would kill me.

These people don’t like anyone they think is a leader. If they thought that you may challenge them or tell the people not to do what they say then they will kill you. There would be no hesitation.

As a teacher I was singled out. I took their threat very seriously.

I left that place straight away. I was scared.”

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Most of Afar’s 1.4 million people live in the south, close to the Awash river where there is farmland and grazing for animals. But over the last 5 years, successive droughts have made this way of life untenable. This year, after rains failed yet again, the regional government declared a humanitarian crisis.

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They came from every part of the country. People of all ages, faiths and nationalities, all united around a single purpose: to make the G8 leaders sit up, take notice, and take action on hunger.

Veteran campaigners came equipped with straight-talking placards. Children arrived with carefully constructed flowers to add to our huge visual petition. Teenagers turned up with videophones to capture the action.

In total, 45,000 people travelled to Hyde Park for the Big IF rally on Saturday. By the end of my two-and-a-half hour stewarding shift, I felt like I’d spoken to most of them.

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