For the eighth time, the humanitarian aid organization CARE is pointing out the ten hotspots that were least reported on last year. And for the second time in a row, all of the crises listed in the “Breaking the Silence” report are on the African continent. It seems that the world pays least attention to the places where suffering is most severe.
Together with the media monitoring service “Meltwater”, CARE searched five million online reports from January 1st to September 30th, 2023 in the languages Arabic, German, English, French and Spanish for reports of humanitarian crises. 48 such crises were identified, affecting at least one million people. The ranking included some disasters that nobody cares regarding year following year, but there were also some crises that were new this year.
“We want to remember these crises”
According to CARE Austria managing director Andrea Barschdorf-Hager at a press conference on Thursday, all of these crises have one thing in common: “They are chronic and long-lasting. As a humanitarian aid organization, we want to remind the public of these crises with the report at least once a year. ” As in the previous year, Angola took first place, with just 1,049 online reports found. This is despite the fact that droughts, floods and hunger in Angola mean that more than seven million people need humanitarian assistance. For comparison: 273,279 online articles appeared worldwide regarding the new Barbie film in the same period last year.
Barschdorf-Hager attributed the fact that certain trouble spots are hardly reported to, among other things, austerity measures in the media: “The global humanitarian need has never been as great as in 2023. This was also reflected in international reporting. It is clear that more recent events such as the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey, the war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict in the Middle East dominate the headlines. Many crises in Africa have existed for a long time, which makes reporting difficult. But we also see that human and financial resources of the media is declining, which means that foreign reporting is less.”
Often no access to the crisis regions
In order to change that and expand reporting on the forgotten disasters, according to the CARE managing director, measures would be necessary on several levels: The governments concerned would have to guarantee journalists safe access to the crisis regions. “This doesn’t happen everywhere.” The possibility of independent and objective reporting must also be guaranteed there. And it requires resources that ultimately have to be made available to humanitarian aid organizations, but also stakeholders. Barschdorf-Hager gave the example of the EU, which has its own pot for forgotten crises.
In second and third place are two other states, Zambia and Burundi, whose crises have already been mentioned several times in previous CARE reports. The Central African Republic, in sixth place this year, has been featured in each of the eight reports so far. However, Senegal (fourth place), Mauritania (fifth place) and Uganda (ninth place) are new.
According to Deepmala Mahla, CARE Director of Humanitarian Aid, the fact that Africa is particularly present on this list is hardly surprising: “According to the United Nations, almost 300 million people worldwide will need humanitarian aid in 2024 – half of them in Africa.” What is surprising, however, is how little is known regarding the humanitarian crises – especially in Angola. One should not forget that hunger is almost always man-made. “In order to save lives, in addition to more attention, sufficient funding for humanitarian aid is needed. Last year only 35 percent of the required financial resources were made available for humanitarian aid, which is definitely not enough,” appealed Mahla.
“Climate change doesn’t play fair”
She also pointed out that climate change plays a major role in virtually all crises. “And climate change doesn’t play fair: it drives famine, it makes water problems even worse, it destroys people’s living spaces, it prevents children from going to school,” Mahla gave some examples of the consequences.
Incidentally, the earthquake zone in Turkey and Syria attracted the most attention in online reports regarding crisis and disaster areas, with more than 700,000 articles, followed by Ukraine. The Middle East came in fourth place ahead of Sudan, but “that will definitely change this year,” said Barschdorf-Hager.
Malawi (second place last year), Chad (fifth place in 2023), Mali (eighth place in 2023) and Niger (tenth place last year) did not make the top ten places this year. According to Mahla and Barschdorf-Hager, this is not because the situation in these countries has improved, but has tended to worsen, but rather because other crises received even less attention in online reports. If you look at ranks 11 to 20 of the least noticed crises, you can find Mali (eleventh place), Malawi (15) and Niger (18). Incidentally, among the top 20, only four of the least noticed crises – North Korea (13), El Salvador (17), Peru (19) and Sri Lanka (20) – are not in Africa.
