SRI LANKA: Older returnees face isolation, poverty

Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN

Elderly returnees need greater assistance

COLOMBO, 30 March 2011 (IRIN) – Thousands of older returnees to Sri Lanka’s conflict-affected north feel marginalized and need medical care, experts say.

“There are hardly any programmes to help these people,” said Samantha Liyanawaduge, executive director of Help Age Sri Lanka, one of just a handful of agencies targeting older returnees.

Although no official figures are available, estimates suggest there are more than 30,000 people over the age of 60 in the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the island’s north once under the control of the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which waged a decades-long civil war for an independent Tamil homeland.

Since the war ended in May 2009, more than 320,000 displaced have returned to their homes or are now staying with relatives, the UN reports.

According to community workers, many of the elderly show signs of trauma or isolation and struggle to meet their daily needs. Those without extended family support face poverty, loneliness, dependency, ill health and lack of nutrition and access to adequate healthcare.

Chelliah Philip Nesakumar, an Anglican priest from Kilinochchi, the former de-facto capital of the LTTE, says the elderly often feel abandoned, with some demonstrating sudden outbursts of anger.

“On the surface they appear ok, but many are carrying the psychological scars of two-and-a-half decades of war,” Nesakumar said.

Veeran Pandaran, a 61-year-old grandfather from Kilinochchi, had hoped things would get better when the war ended. “Life is certainly safer now, but we’ve been left to fend for ourselves,” Pandaran said.

Ongoing development and rehabilitation work in his area includes hardly any programmes tailored to the old and impaired, he claimed. “There is nothing to help people like me,” he insisted. “It’s as if we are not important.”

Photo: Dominic Sansoni/World Bank

Thousand of Sri Lankans, many of them old, fled the conflict

Limited resources

Help Age Sri Lanka – which has been working for the rights of marginalized senior citizens since 1986 – would like to do more, but resources are limited, forcing the agency to focus on the most serious cases first.

In February, it opened a small sub-office in Kilinochchi to coordinate its work and dispatch mobile medical clinics to the area each week.

Most of the elderly have cataracts. Of every 100 people the NGO sees, more than 60 percent are given glasses, while 20 to 30 percent require surgery.

Help Age has its own eye clinic near the capital, Colombo, which can carry out cataract operations free of charge; however, many people are physically unable to travel the 300km distance, or simply do not have the funds to make the journey.

This in turn leaves them no other option but to seek treatment at a hospital in the northern town of Vavuniya, 70km south of Killinochi, where the operation can be carried out at a cost of around US$55 – money many simply do not have.

“That’s money these people don’t have to spare,” Liyanawaduge said.

Help Age organizes community groups and would also like to initiate programmes to generate income for them.

In the east of the country, Help Age has used elders’ groups to start home-gardening, poultry and small cattle-farming operations.

“We know more needs to be done, but we simply don’t have the financial resources to take them on,” Liyanawaduge said.

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SOMALIA: Drought-displaced “in tens of thousands”

Photo: Mohamed Amin Jibril/IRIN

“There is not a single region from the south to the north that is not suffering [from drought],” Abdi Haji Gobdon, spokesman for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), told IRIN

HARGEISA/NAIROBI, 30 March 2011 (IRIN) – With drought spreading to almost all regions of Somalia, officials and aid workers have expressed concern for those affected, saying drought was now a major cause of displacement.

“Drought, not insecurity, is now the main reason for new displacement in Somalia,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA Somalia) said in a March update. “More than 52,000 people have been displaced due to drought since 1 December 2010, many of them moving to urban areas in search of assistance.”

In particular, the capital, Mogadishu, had experienced an increased influx of drought-affected pastoralists, said OCHA.

“Although migration of people and livestock is not unusual during the dry season, this appears to be the first time ever pastoralists and their livestock have migrated into the capital, a situation that portrays the severity of the drought situation in the country,” OCHA said.

Abdi Haji Gobdon, spokesman for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), told IRIN on 30 March: “The drought is spreading and getting worse. We are getting reports not only of livestock dying but people too.

“There is not a single region from the south to the north that is not suffering,” he said.

Aid appeal

Gedo in the southwest, parts of southern regions and the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, as well as central Somali regions, are the worst affected, according to Gobdon.

“Livestock are dying in their thousands, with families losing everything,” he said, adding that the drought had forced many pastoralists into camps for the displaced. “They have lost everything and they think they may get help if they reach the camps.”

Gobdon said the TFG could not address the situation alone and appealed to the international community for assistance.

“The problem with this drought is how long it has been going on,” he said.

Gu rains should have started in most parts of the country. Gobdon said: “In a good year, it should be raining by now, but we have not seen a drop yet.”

Targeting livelihoods

In response to the drought, the Common Humanitarian Fund for Somalia allocated US$4.5 million in March in emergency funding, targeting agriculture and livelihoods; water, sanitation and hygiene.

In the self-declared republic of Somaliland, more than four months of drought have led to disease outbreaks and severe water shortages, with government officials appealing for help for the most drought-affected populations.

“The government of Somaliland has appealed for support; so far we have collected about $500,000 from the public, which we spent on water-trucking to the drought-affected in remote areas,” Hussein Abdi Du’alle, Somaliland’s Minister for Water and Minerals, told a press conference in the capital, Hargeisa.

“Initially, only three regions were affected but now the drought has reached everywhere,” Mohamed Muse Awale, the chairman of Somaliland’s National Environmental Research and Disaster Preparedness Commission, said.

Mohamed Abdillahi, an elder in Hudun, 83km northeast of Las-anod district in Sool region, told IRIN: “The biggest problem is water shortages; water is trucked from Burou in Togdheer region, 260-270km away, and its price keeps rising. For example, a barrel [200l] of water was only $8 three months ago, now it is $15.”

Deaths reported

In Sool region, eastern Somaliland, officials have reported four deaths following an outbreak of diarrhoea. Ali Bile, head of Awr-Bogeys health post in Sool, 50km northeast of Las-anod, said all four deaths – a man and three children – occurred in the past week.

Ali Bulale, mayor of Hudun district, said at least 40 people in the district had contracted diarrhoea, mostly children.

“The district was one of the few places which enjoyed the Deyr [long] rains; this caused many people from Sanag, Sool, Togdheer and even from Puntland to gather here in search of pasture,” Bulale said. “Now nothing of the pasture is left.”

Ahmed Abdi Bile, coordinator of the Red Crescent in Somaliland, said: “There are six mobile health-sector teams giving food to malnourished children in the regions of Sool, Sanag and Sahel. With the collaboration of UNICEF [UN Children's Fund], there are also seven more teams doing the same job in the regions of Sool, Sahel, Togdher, Awdal and Sanag.”

Mark Bowden, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, has called for humanitarian access to support Somalis affected by drought.

“I am extremely concerned about the impact of the current drought on the well-being of children, women and the general population in Somalia,” he said in a statement. “Severe water shortages require collective efforts and further cooperation at all levels to deliver a well-coordinated response to mitigate the consequences of the drought on the lives of the Somali population.”

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GLOBAL: The road ahead for information sharing in emergency response

Photo: Keishamaza Rukikaire/IRIN

After the quake, Haitians used mobile phones to send thousands of pleas for rescue (file photo)

DUBAI, 30 March 2011 (IRIN) – Humanitarians do not yet make the most of new technology and virtual teams to expedite emergency response, and deal with “exponential” information flow, says a new report.

“The humanitarian community, though relying on scarce resources in response, is still performing [basic] tasks that computers can handle,” John Crowley, from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and the lead author of Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, told IRIN.

“The machine which enters data into specific tables can pull it out, aggregate it and put in a composite format,” he added. “This is the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had for the Semantic Web for more than a decade. We are just getting to that… and Haiti was the tipping point.”

The report – commissioned by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation – looks at the aftermath of the Haiti quake and makes recommendations on how the humanitarian aid community, can work with volunteer and technical communities to improve response and accountability in future emergencies.

After the quake, it notes, Haitians used mobile phones to send thousands of pleas for rescue. Unfortunately “humanitarian field staff had neither tools nor capacity to listen to the new flow of requests arriving directly from the Haitian citizens.”

“When humanitarian staff arrived in Haiti, a lot of the baseline, paper-based data about schools and hospitals was missing, as much of it remained trapped in the collapsed government and UN buildings,” Adele Waugaman, senior director of Technology Partnership at the UN Foundation, told IRIN. “This meant that the deployed humanitarian staff had to build rescue and relief efforts largely in the absence of information about available resources,” she added.

Humanitarian actors, Waugaman said, faced with a devasted infrastructure and few records, still needed to handle and analyze huge amounts of information. Distributed networks of volunteers and crowd sourcing could support more efficient relief efforts by filling some of those gaps.

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

The report calls for a physical space where humanitarians and volunteer communities can meet (file photo)

Volunteer communities

During the Haiti emergency, thousands of ordinary people worldwide volunteered to collect, translate and plot rescue and aid pleas on maps, and organize other technical efforts to support disaster response. The result was a new dynamic of volunteer and technical communities which began to aggregate, geolocate and prioritize incoming messages from various media. In the most successful cases, they were able to guide search and rescue teams on the ground.

“The volunteer and technical communities made us think how we should change our work… They have a system where they can open an application programming interface that enables a computer to reach into the system, pull out data, push that data back and enables a faster, more efficient and much more standardized exchange of data,” Crowley said.

“This worked much better than those trying to create spreadsheets, build bullet points to brief policymakers, do video conferences that cost lots of bandwidth, money and staff time,” he added. “We have to start looking at adapting to the fact that the information flow appears to be increasing in an exponential rate.”

The future

The report recommends establishing a humanitarian technology forum, where representatives from the UN, humanitarian, volunteer and technical communities can hold open, honest dialogue to identify challenges in collecting and sharing disaster-related information. It called for a physical space where humanitarians and volunteer communities can meet to advance tools, practices and policies based on the needs identified by the humanitarian technology forum.

It also called for the creation of an organization with a mandate to deploy the best available tools and practices from the volunteer communities to the field; a research and training consortium to train humanitarians and volunteer communities in best practices for information management in a humanitarian context; and a clear operational interface that outlines ways of collaborating before and during emergencies.

But the bigger challenge now, according to Waugaman of the UN Foundation is “how to connect volunteer communities with the humanitarian system so when these needs are mapped, somebody will take responsibility to respond… This does not exist and that is why this dialogue is important,” she added.

Launching the report on 28 March, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos said: “The challenge is in exploring how to better coordinate between the structured and hierarchical humanitarian system and the relatively loosely organized and flat volunteer and technical communities… Without a direct relationship with the humanitarian system, volunteer and technical communities run the risk of mapping needs without being able to make sure that these needs can be met.”

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