Concern Blogs

Ensuring proper nutrition for pregnant women and for the first two years of life ends the cycle of malnutrition. Photo: Concern Worldwide

By Tom Arnold – Concern Chief Executive Officer

After seven straight months of growth, global food prices are now at their highest levels since records began.

The UN Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) Food Price Index, which measures monthly price changes for a food basket which includes cereals, oilseeds, dairy, meat and sugar was higher in January than the last previous high in June 2008.  That peak sparked riots across the world, as people who lived on the margin and relied on the market to purchase food were plunged further into poverty.

In 2009, as a result of this, the number of people in the world suffering from hunger topped one billion for the first time in history.

The signs now are ominous for us all with the FAO expecting the price of agricultural commodities to rise further throughout this year. This will put enormous pressure on the world’s poorest who have had to cope relentlessly with the consequences of higher prices for the past two years. The World Bank has estimated that 44 million people have been pushed into poverty since last summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Young mother with her child in Sindh Province, where Concern is supporting thousands of Internally Displaced People to rebuild their lives after the devastating flooding of 2010. Photo: Pakistan, Concern Worldwide

By Mubashir Ahmed, Concern Assistant Country Director in Pakistan

Last summer’s massive floods swept through and destroyed lives, houses, crop lands and road infrastructure, causing enormous suffering and damages across an area the size of Italy. The disaster has drawn a significant emergency and recovery response on the part of numerous International NGOs, taking them to often remote areas where any kind of aid had been sparse for many years.
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Children in Grand Bassa with school curriculum materials provided with support from Concern. Photo: Ester Havens, Liberia

By Jenny Hobbs, Education Coordinator, Liberia

When a girl starts school in Liberia, she arrives full of enthusiasm and hope. Squeezing onto a bench with children her age—under a corrugated roof, in a make-shift building—she looks to her teacher ready to learn. But, without books to read from, a desk to lean on or a pencil to hold, progress is slow. Her teacher is an untrained, unqualified, unpaid volunteer. He struggles to control the overcrowded class and yearns for a curriculum to follow, textbooks to use or a decent blackboard to write on.

Concern Liberia is working to address these issues in 30 remote schools in Grand Bassa County. Constructing classrooms, separate toilets for boys and girls and providing furniture is just the start. Textbooks and other essential learning items like blackboards, pencils and copybooks are also being distributed. Read the rest of this entry »

Concern conducts a hygiene session in Abas Khan with program participants. Photo: Joop Koopman, Concern Worldwide

By Joop Koopman, Press Officer, Concern Worldwide US

Seen from the air, the greenness and neat outlines of the farm fields of Punjab stand in sharp contrast with Sindh Province, its much poorer and more desert-like neighbor to the south.

My colleague Susan Finucane and I are flying from Karachi on Pakistan’s southern coast into the Punjabi city of Multan, an historically significant garrison town in the heart of the country that is today a well-kept, clean-swept bustling city. The relative privilege of the place and the orderliness of local traffic are a far cry from the chaos of urban streets we have just left behind in Sindh.

The ordered lushness observed from altitude makes sense. Punjab is literally the ‘land of five rivers’, fertile, relatively affluent and crucial to Pakistan as a grower of wheat and other crops. A kind of cognitive dissonance takes hold.

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By Joop Koopman, Press Officer, Concern Worldwide US

Their homes destroyed, villagers in Sindh rely on tarpaulin and bamboo frames for shelter. Photo: Pakistan, Concern Worldwide

Susan Finucane, program officer at Concern Worldwide US, and I have come to Pakistan to report on the progress of Concern’s large-scale emergency program in response to the megadisaster caused by summer’s unprecedented heavy rains and massive flooding that left an area the size of Italy underwater.

Upon our arrival, Dorothy Blane, Concern Worldwide Country Director in Pakistan, briefs us on Concern’s immediate priorities and our approach to this particular disaster, which is informed by a long track record in both long-term development and emergencies in Pakistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Parents of children attending the Duguna Deddo Primary School at work on a new library that more than 2,000 children will access to borrow books. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern US

Though she lives just a short walk from the local school, Maza Matthews, 14, rises before dawn every morning to help take care of her younger siblings so that she can be at her school desk for 8:00 am.  Like all pupils in this remote rural village of Duguna Fango, in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR), Maza’s parents have determined with the school which shift suits their family best.

Double-shift schooling was adopted in Ethiopia as a solution to the overcrowding that ensued after 2002 when the government introduced free primary education for all. In practice it serves many purposes by reducing large class numbers, doubling the number of seats available in a day; and allowing schools to operate on lower budgets. Read the rest of this entry »

By Allyson Brown, Operations Director for Concern Worldwide US

Did you know that women produce more than half of the world’s food but earn only 10% of the world’s income? And although women produce up to 80% of food in the developing world, they often aren’t able to grow enough to feed themselves and their families. Despite global commitments to improve gender equity, we know that poverty and hunger still have a woman’s face. Why? Because when times are hard, they eat last and least.

Tomorrow, October 16th will mark World Food Day, a day designated to heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen unity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. If we are serious about fighting hunger and beating global poverty, the empowerment of women farmers must be prioritized.
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Flood affected children in Charsadda district. Photo: Anya Raza/Concern Worldwide

Good news is rare as Pakistan’s greatest natural disaster continues to unfold before our eyes. But after nearly two weeks of trying, we have finally reached desperate flood victims in two remote districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) Province, Kohistan and Shangla. These were among the worst hit in the disaster but the rains and flooded roads held us back, and even the government couldn’t get there at first.  The good news is now that we are there we can began to bring in food and relief items that will literally save lives – these people are on the brink. Read the rest of this entry »

A boy holds his sibling as flood victims wait on roadside for food handout from motorists in Pakistan's Muzaffargarh district in Punjab province August 11, 2010. Photo: Reuters/Adrees Latif, courtesy www.alertnet.org

I arrived in Pakistan the beginning of week two of this massive emergency. There is an adjustment to be made as you step off the plane and take in the enormity of the damage and human suffering. Here the adjustment is colored with a sense of incomprehension as to why—so many days after the floods began—there is not a sense of greater urgency outside of Pakistan.

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It is monsoon season in Pakistan: rain is not unusual this time of year. But starting on Friday of last week, the Concern team and I watched with literal horror as unprecedented levels of extremely heavy, sustained rain poured down in the mountainous areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPK) and other areas—triggering the worst floods ever recorded in Pakistan.

Rivers burst their banks and flooded crops, homes, and roads with frightening speed, in many areas entirely communities. Roads and bridges have been cut off—and many villages in KPK are unreachable, particularly in Swat and Charsadda Districts.

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