IVORY COAST REFUGEE CRISIS

Responding to the Ivory Coast humanitarian crisis

The birth of a nation and challenges for the future

The people of southern Sudan have voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence

Election officials confirmed nearly 99% of voters who took part in a landmark vote in January favoured separation from the north. The move will pave the way for the creation of the world's newest nation by July.


In the past few months, tens of thousands of southern Sudanese have been returning home; most had been living in the north, some for decades.

Oxfam's emergency, preparedness and response team (EP and R team) has been intervening in some of the most crowded areas to help prevent the spread of disease. The team, funded by the European Commission Humanitarian Aid department, ECHO, has been working for the last few weeks in Leer county, Unity State, to provide some basic water and sanitation services to the local communities as well as the new returnees.

Southern Sudan remains one of the poorest and least developed regions in the world, and only recently emerged from decades of civil war.

After decades of war, southern Sudan needs to be built almost from scratch, and there are enormous challenges. Most people do not have access to clean water, sanitation, or adequate schools or healthcare.

Island and coastal hopping, Tanzania

Fish market, Stone Town, Zanzibar









Colobus monkeys

south Sudanese vote in a historic referendum

Strangers back home

Martha Bol, a widow, and her children, spent their first night back in Leer county in southern Sudan sleeping outside in the cold. It wasn’t quite the homecoming she was expecting, but she was still excited to be back after spending the last two decades living on the outskirts of Khartoum, in the north of Sudan.

“I was born here and I will stay here”, she said. “This is our land and our chance to be free.”



Martha and several other families had temporarily camped out in the yard of a government building in Leer town. Their household belongings, all they could carry with them, were scattered all around. A few mats, some blankets, a few pots and pans. Suitcases. Recently-laundered clothes hung on bamboo fences to dry in the afternoon sun.




The families were all originally born in the south but left during Sudan’s decades-long civil war, which finally ended in 2005 after claiming more than two million lives. Their journey back by boat, chartered by the Government of Southern Sudan, had been delayed many times and eventually took 11 days. Too late for them to register to vote in the landmark referendum – in which southern Sudanese will decide if they want to remain part of a united Sudan or secede and become the world’s newest nation.

The families are among tens of thousands of southerners who had been living in the north and who have returned to the south in the last few months. Thousands more are likely to follow.



For many like Martha, they’ve been away for so long that they either can’t remember where they lived or their houses no longer exist.

Huge challenges lie ahead. The family will need to find land to settle; work out how to earn some money and adjust to a new way of life.

They are returning to one of the least developed regions on earth, and putting additional strain on villages and communities that already struggle to find enough water and food. 80 percent of adults cannot read and write; there are few paved roads, and limited numbers of schools and health clinics. Less than half the population are able to access safe drinking water.

Martha told me her husband, a soldier, died in the fighting. They used to be farmers, she said, but she’d long-forgotten that way of life and had no idea how she would earn a living and feed her family.

“Its been a long time,” she sighed. “I don’t even know the village where I used to live… if anything still exists.“

“You cannot compare life in the north to here. Khartoum is more developed, but things were not easy for us. I’m happy to be back even though we have no house, and no job”, she said. “I’m happy to be back”, she insisted again.

“I want my children to go to school; to live in peace and not experience the difficulties we had; to live a better life in the future.”

Pakistan floods: debt and land worries

AFTER PAKISTAN’S FLOODS, NEW WORRIES ABOUT DEBT AND LAND RIGHTS

Naimat Ahmed’s village in Thatta district, in Sindh, is still under water. She shows me her flooded field, where she’d been growing rice, wading into the waters to show me how high the levels still remain. She opens up the door to her simple mud-and-thatch home, which is full of squelchy mud. She won’t be able to move back inside until the ground dries out and has to sleep with others in the village out in the open air, in makeshift shelters constructed from wooden poles with cotton sheeting as a roof. Yet she and a group of other women in the village were determined to head back home as quickly as possible after Pakistan’s devastating floods to protect their stake to the land.

“Our land is here. We feared if we didn’t come back quickly, people would come and stay here and take things from our homes”, Naimat Ahmed told me.



Naimat Ahmed

Naimat’s wish to protect her precious assets is understandable. Until earlier this year, she had no land at all, until she was awarded four acres under the Sindh provincial government’s land re-distribution programme. It’s the first scheme of its kind in South Asia, where tracts of state-owned land are given to landless women peasants in an attempt to begin reducing poverty and bring about much wider social changes in rural areas.

It’s estimated 60% of people in Sindh are landless, while large areas of farmland are owned by small, wealthy and politically influential elites. And now Pakistan’s devastating floods, which destroyed homes, fields and livestock, are forcing some of the poorest in Pakistan, without adequate food, shelter, or jobs, deeper into debt.

“This was going to be my first crop from my own land and the rice was almost ready to harvest. Then the floods came”, said Naimat. “Everything was destroyed. I can’t see how we can get enough food and it will be several months before we can use our land again. But even then, we don’t have money for seeds and fertilizer”, she said. “We have debts from shops that have given us credit. Things are difficult.”

Sindh was the region worst-affected by the floods; and in many areas flood waters still remain stubbornly high, refusing to drain away.



More than a million people remain displaced, their homes damaged or destroyed. The worry is that when families do return home, new disputes could arise over land as many boundaries, previously marked by irrigation channels, have been washed away and ownership records have been destroyed.

Land disputes had arisen even before the floods. The first phase of Sindh’s land redistribution programme had some serious flaws and was tainted by allegations of nepotism and corruption.

Mother of six, Aasi Mallah, was physically attacked by people in her village in Jati town who disputed her claim to land after she had been awarded a four acre plot by the provincial government. “Our land was a blessing. But a large group of people gathered and threatened us; they became violent and beat us”, she told me, showing me a scar on her daughter’s face.


Aasi Mallah

Aasi and her family were forced to flee their village and now live on a small plot of land by a roadside owned by her husband’s former landlord, determined to pursue her land battle through the courts. It could be a long process. Oxfam and its partner, Participatory Development Initiatives, have been helping Aasi and other women like her with legal support as well as spreading awareness among some of the poorest in Sindh about their rights to claim for land under the re-distribution scheme.

Some of the original flaws in the land programme have been ironed out, thanks to lobbying by groups like PDI and Oxfam. And, despite the floods, the authorities in Sindh have pledged to continue with the scheme, rolling it out to more areas across the province.

“Property rights for women in Pakistan is a rarity – and sometimes an impossibility”, said Saima Hassan, PDI’s Land for Women Programme officer. “The distribution of government land to landless peasant women in Sindh is a historic initiative. And while it has had flaws, we’re trying to make sure that all the women eligible for land under the scheme receive it; and can change their status from peasant to landowner.”

The hope is that not only will the scheme continue to be rolled out across Sindh, but also in other parts of Pakistan; giving some of the poorest families a chance to own land that, for generations, they’ve cultivated and lived on; a chance to finally begin to lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty and debt.