Concern Blogs

Refugee children at Dosseye Camp, Southern Chad where Concern is meeting the needs of refugees from Central African Republic. Photo: Francesca Reinhardt, Chad

By Francesca Reinhardt, Program Support Officer, Chad

Fatou Yali dreams of the herd of cattle her family once had, and the day she can start building up her own herd in her new home in Chad.  Fatou is one of 76,000 refugees from the Central African Republic now rebuilding their lives in neighbouring Chad.

“Many people left ahead of us, when they heard the rebels were approaching,” she says, “but we wanted to stay.  Even when they took our cattle, we wanted to stay.  But when the shooting came to our door, we had to leave.”

Fatou comes from near the town of Paoua, northern CAR, which has seen heavy fighting between rebel and government forces since 2003.  She is from the Fula tribe, which stretches across west and central Africa, and who make up a large part of the Dosseye refugee camp, near the town of Goré, Southern Chad.

They have been here for four years, and as the situation in CAR remains volatile, many have little hope of returning.  The government and local communities have generously donated land to the refugees, allowing them to take the first steps towards self-sufficiency.  Read the rest of this entry »

Dosseye Refugee Camp, Southern Chad. Photo: Francesca Reinhardt

By Francesca Reinhardt, Program Support Officer, Chad  

At 6:30 am on the dot the rain begins to fall in Goré, southern Chad.  It sounds like an avalanche clattering down on the tin roof overhead.  This is the sound everyone’s been waiting for with bated breath, because it’s already mid-May and the rains should have started a few weeks ago.  But after twenty minutes it stops.  Is it a false alarm?  There’s no more rain, but the air is thick and heavy and clouds still hover in the distance, promising more.  So after a long, hot dry season, the farmers swing into gear.

When to plant is a serious gamble for farmers.  If the rains don’t start in earnest, the soil will dry up and precious seeds will get blown away.  If they wait too long, it might be too late, and food stores from the year before will have to last even longer.  For many subsistence farmers, the months between the end of the harsh dry season and the first harvest are known as the “hunger gap,” when they have to survive on the last of the cereal crop, foraging, and loans.

There is an added danger that if families get too hungry, they will eat the seeds they need to plant for the next harvest, thus threatening their food supply for the following year.  Some families hide their seeds in trees, or anywhere else that will keep them out of reach of hungry children.  This is obviously a difficult choice for families to make: to have their children go hungry now, or risk starvation the following year. Read the rest of this entry »

Maria Otero, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs speaking on June 13 during the morning session of the 1,000 days event in Washington, DC. Photo: Washington, Concern Worldwide

By Tom Arnold, CEO, Concern Worldwide and David Beckmann, President, Bread for the World

Today we join more than 350 high-level government officials, leaders of civil society organizations, and activists from all over the world to galvanize political momentum to scale up nutrition initiatives that will help save the lives of at least 1 million children annually.

During “1,000 Days to Scale Up Nutrition for Mothers & Children: Building Political Commitment,” we’ll discuss the critical importance of proper nutrition, particularly during the 1,000 days from pregnancy to 2 years old. Conclusive evidence points to the devastating impact of malnutrition on infant and child mortality, and its irreversible, long-term effects on health and cognitive and physical development. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul O’Brien is Overseas Director
for Concern Worldwide

Members of a shea butter collective that Concern works with in Gore, Chad. Photo: Chad, Concern Worldwide

I arrived in Chad last week to meet with our country team, and to assess our programs and the ongoing humanitarian needs in our program areas. Chad is one of the world’s seven least developed countries: it ranks at 163 out of 169 countries on the 20

10 United Nations Human Development Index. The goal of our programs here is to target the poorest communities in the poorest parts of Chad—and I was curious to see how successfully we were doing that. Read the rest of this entry »

Shea butter training gets underway in Goré, southern Chad, where Concern trains women in the processing of Shea butter and production of soap, food stuffs, and cosmetics. Photo: Chad, Concern Worldwide

Francesca Reinhardt, Program Support Officer, Concern Worldwide, Chad

I’m based in a small town called Goz Beida in eastern Chad.  It’s a dusty corner of the Sahel, where the bulk of the traffic comes in the form of slow-moving donkeys and camels. It’s an unforgiving environment, but I’m learning things here that I don’t think I could learn anywhere else.

Chad is a vast landlocked country, covering several eco-zones, and some of the highest rates of poverty on the planet. The challenges are enormous.  Chad has the world’s highest child infant mortality rate, and is in the bottom five countries ranked by the United Nations Human Development Index. Chad has experienced not only natural disasters, but also civil conflict, the internal displacement of populations, refugees fleeing conflict in neighboring Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Sudan, the Sahel food crisis, drought, flooding, and cholera outbreaks. Read the rest of this entry »

Concern distributed cash via mobile phones to extremely vulnerable communities at high risk of malnutrition in Niger, pre-empting a massive food crisis. Photo: Niger, Concern Worldwide

By Tom Arnold – Concern Worldwide Chief Executive Officer

Last Friday April 15—as part of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC—I was a panelist in a groundbreaking global conversation, the Open Forum. It was a unique opportunity for a small group of experts to engage not only with each other, but with 3,000 participants in a concurrent 24-hour chat, and people from 91 countries who had submitted comments and ideas online before the event. The topic was the food crisis—crippling market volatility whose net effect has been a sustained increase in food prices, wreaking havoc on the world’s poor.

This was no staid academic exercise.  It was an invaluable part of a larger conversation that grows more urgent by the day because each day, more lives hang in the balance. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick starkly put it, “we’re one event away from a very serious crisis.” 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Concern was on the ground distributing water to Haitians just 48 hours after the earthquake of January 12, 2010. Photo: Haiti, Concern Worldwide

By Jennifer Jalovec, Haiti Emergency Program Coordinator, Concern Worldwide

My journey to Haiti really began with 9/11. I had been working in marketing and promotions for broadcast and print media in New York at the time, a job I had held for nine years. In the days following the attack, I started to question what I was doing with my life and if I were making any kind of positive impact in the lives of others.

Fast forward to 2005: I joined the Peace Corps at age 35, and my humanitarian career was off and running. Today, I am the Emergency Coordinator for Concern Worldwide in Haiti, overseeing a recovery program for the poorest country in western hemisphere, which is still reeling from the devastating earthquake that struck it a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

A family at their tent in Farooqabad Village, Charsadda District. Photo: Jennifer O'Gorman, Concern Worldwide

Last week Mubashir Ahmed Concern’s Assistant Country Director visited a school-turned-distribution center in Charsadda, located in the province of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa (KPK), where he met with several people whose lives are hanging in the balance as a result of the recent flooding in Pakistan.

Single mother of three Mina Gul was working as a maid, she told me, before the floodwaters raged through her village of Sanamgari in the Charsadda district of Pakistan’s northwest. She was thankful, she said, that the waters came in the night because otherwise she may not have been with her family to take them to safety. Read the rest of this entry »