Tag Archives: Africa

Rwanda harnesses lake ‘demons’ to power the economy

Fishermen set out for their expedition from the shores of Lake Kivu in Goma.

By Clement Uwiringiyimana

LAKE KIVU, Rwanda (Reuters) – Some Rwandans tell stories of “demons” in Lake Kivu causing the deaths of fishermen and swimmers who have occasionally disappeared on one of Africa’s great expanses of water in the heart of the continent.

Now Rwanda is turning the methane gas which can bubble up from the lake bed, sometimes with fatal consequences, into a lifeline by generating electricity to help businesses expand and light up a nation with a chronic power shortage.

Across Africa, governments are struggling to increase power capacity and expand grids to meet the demands of growing populations with rising aspirations. Poor electricity supplies are often cited as one of the biggest hurdles to investment.

Rwanda’s KivuWatt plant, which started in May, is part of a network of projects aimed at providing 70 percent of the 11 million population with power from the grid or off-grid by 2018, up from 25 percent now. Much will come from renewable resources.

“The country cannot grow if you don’t have power,” Jarmo Gummerus, country manager for the plant developed by U.S. company ContourGlobal, told Reuters on the lush shores of Lake Kivu, where a hi-tech barge gathers methane from the depths.

Rwanda, one of Africa’s poorest nations but also among its fastest growing, is harnessing its limited solar, peat and hydro resources to curb the landlocked country’s fuel import bill while keeping power flowing to spur on industry and create jobs.

Lake Kivu’s methane has now been added to the list of its emerging resources, formed from biogas created by decomposing matter on the bed of the lake that is trapped by a layer of mineral-rich water flowing off nearby volcanic soil.

Left untapped, it could one day explode or, as in the case of another lake in Cameroon, poison inhabitants on shore if it bubbles up in large quantities, experts say. Some locals say it has already claimed unsuspecting victims on the lake.

“There are stories based on superstition that swimmers are taken away by demons,” said Eric Manywa, 20, who sometimes takes a dip. “I don’t believe that. It might be due to methane gas.”

KivuWatt’s Gummerus said the gas in the lake, which can bubble up, contains combustible methane – extracted for the power plant – mixed with other gas that is highly toxic. “It just kills almost immediately so it’s very dangerous.”

His company is now carefully extracting the methane to power a 26 megawatt (MW) plant, with plans to increase that to 100 MW by 2020 at a cost of about $500 million to $600 million.

Despite that hefty investment, using domestic resources is a boon for a nation which has to truck all imports into the country about 1,400 km (870 miles) through Kenya or Tanzania, often along traffic-clogged roads that are poorly maintained.

POWERING BUSINESS

“Our power is much cheaper than the alternative which would be putting in diesel or heavy fuel,” Gummerus said, adding the methane could also be processed for to sell as cooking gas.

Eventually, Rwanda could generate about 350 MW from methane, with a similar potential in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which shares the lake. Congo yet to tap the gas supplies.

The start-up of the KivuWatt plant is already benefiting local businesses in the region of rolling green hills and volcanic peaks, which the government wants to promote as a tourist destination.

“When I built this hotel in 2013, we could have power cuts every three hours, at least, but nowadays we have electricity 24/7,” said Jerome Musomandera, owner of the Kivu Plaza Hotel, one of a number next to the lake.

Some other hotels said they had yet to feel the benefit, but were hopeful that they would soon be able to unplug private stand-by generators and enjoy lower bills from grid power.

As it adds more supply, state-run Rwanda Energy Group (REG) is in talks with the regulator on lowering tariffs to help the poor and support industry, its chief executive Jean Bosco Mugiraneza said.

Rwanda now charges 17 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour (kwh) for industry and 21 cents for others. Mugiraneza did not say how much costs could fall by.

Rwanda’s installed power capacity is now 190 MW and set to rise by the end of July to 205 MW, once a new peat-burning plant being tested is linked up. The aim is 583 MW by 2018, a goal Mugiraneza admits Rwanda would have to “work hard” to achieve.

“The government alone cannot afford to finance those 563 MW; that is why private investments are needed,” he said.

KivuWatt was a pioneer by negotiating the first private power purchase agreement, helping pave the way for others.

Other deals that have been signed include one with U.S. firm Symbion Power, which plans a methane plant too. Another firm, Ignite Power, is helping the government to provide off-grid rooftop solar power panels to 250,000 households by 2018.

As well as helping meet Rwanda’s national generation ambitions, Gummerus said the KivuWatt plant was boosting the local economy in the Kibuye region around the lake.

“If you came here eight years back when I came, there was nothing,” he said. “It gives confidence for people to come and invest in Kibuye.”

(Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Presidents, billionaires battle World’s deadliest creature

Workers look for holes in mosquito netting at the A to Z Textile Mills factory producing insecticide-treated bednets in Arusha, Tanzania

By Katy Migiro

ARUSHA, Tanzania (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Jakaya Kikwete, the former president of Tanzania, recalled arriving at his cousin’s house to find the family arguing about taking their feverish teenage daughter to hospital.

“They were saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s not malaria’,” he said, describing how the family had sought advice from a traditional medicine man who said a jinni, or spirit, had invaded her body.

“They said: ‘If you take this girl to the hospital, if she gets an injection, then that jinni (spirit)… will… suck all her blood’,” Kikwete said.

Ignoring their protests, he took the girl to hospital but it was too late. She died from malaria.

Kikwete, who also lost his brother to malaria as a child, is committed to eradicating the disease, which killed an estimated 438,000 people globally in 2015 – making the mosquito, which transmits it, the world’s deadliest creature.

He and his wife even appear in television adverts, urging Tanzanians to prepare their bednets before they sleep.

“We are looking at 2040 as the most probable date for a malaria-free Africa,” Kikwete, who stepped down as president in November, told reporters at a recent dinner in Dar es Salaam.

“If we continue with the interventions that we have been doing here relentlessly, we should be able to get there.”

THE “E-WORD”

Global plans to eliminate malaria were abandoned in 1969 as the goal was seen as prohibitively complicated and expensive, despite success in eradicating the disease in the 1950s in parts of Europe, North America and the Caribbean.

The “e-word” has been revived in recent years, with support from the world’s richest couple Bill and Melinda Gates and U.S. President Barack Obama, who called malaria a “moral outrage”.

Bill Gates, who Kikwete describes as a “good friend”, aims to eradicate malaria by 2040 and has called for a doubling of funding by 2025.

His goal of permanently ending transmission of the disease between humans and mosquitoes is more ambitious than the Sustainable Development Goal of ending epidemic levels of malaria by 2030.

Spending on malaria, mostly by the United States, surged to $2.7 billion in 2015 from $130 million in 2000, while death rates in Africa have fallen by 66 per cent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The most important investment was the roll out of one billion free bednets. Some 68 percent of malaria cases prevented since 2000 were stopped by these bednets, according to a study by the University of Oxford.

Money was also poured into improved diagnostic tests, better drugs, indoor spraying with insecticide and educating the public to use these tools – rather than blaming witchcraft or buying medication blindly over the counter every time they got a fever.

EVERYTHING IS FREE

In the Tanzanian town of Arusha, overlooked by the dormant volcano Mount Meru, donor-funded bednets and free tests and medicines have made a significant impact.

In a country with a powerful faith in witchcraft and traditional medicine, health officials have worked hard to persuade people to adopt proven methods of preventing and treating the disease.

“There are very few cases of malaria nowadays,” said Pius Dallos, the officer in charge of Kijenge Dispensary, where women sat on wooden benches, cradling their babies.

“Previously… if you didn’t have money, you could die from malaria. But nowadays, everything is free.”

But donors’ ability to maintain – and increase – funding is by no means certain given sluggish global growth and uncertainties over U.S. funding under a new administration.

“The political will to go that final mile may be hard to sustain because it will remain expensive until the end,” Dyann Wirth, a tropical disease expert at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It’s a question of priority.”

It is unlikely that Africa, which accounted for nine out of 10 of the 214 million cases of malaria in 2015, according to the WHO, could foot the bill itself.

On the edge of Arusha, Africa’s largest bednet manufacturer, A to Z Textile Mills, has been the main source of 50 million free bednets given to Tanzanians between 2009 to 2016.

Giant, noisy warehouses produce insecticide-treated fibres which are woven into round and square blue bednets. Women in green T-shirts work in fast-moving pairs, folding and cutting panels ready for stitching.

Donor funding drives production of the much-needed nets, as many ordinary Tanzanians cannot afford them.

“Demand is not driven by the need (but) by the funding,” said factory director Kalpesh Shah, sitting in front of framed photographs of visits by celebrity campaigners like Bono and Will Smith on the boardroom wall.

Commercial customers account for less than one percent of sales, he said. The Gates-funded Global Fund To Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria is their main buyer, followed by the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative.

“The question of sustainability is on everyone’s mind,” said Daniel Moore, acting mission director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Tanzania.

“Right now, we are carrying the load.”

RISK

The failure of the global eradication programme that began in the 1950s casts a shadow over the latest campaign.

As mosquitoes and parasites developed resistance to insecticides and drugs in the 1960s, malaria rebounded in countries like Sri Lanka where once it had been virtually eliminated.

Resistance is becoming a major problem again. But greater efforts are being made to invest in new products that will keep humans one step ahead of evolution.

New tools are also required to eliminate the parasite from ‘asymptomatic carriers’ – people with a few parasites in their blood who don’t fall sick but can act as reservoir and spread the disease when they get bitten again by mosquitoes.

As the number of malaria cases falls, it will become harder to maintain the momentum among donors, governments and ordinary people in endemic regions.

“Without the long term investment of funds and the political commitment to continue the fight, we risk wasting the entire investment,” said Wirth.

“We are going to go back to the situation where we are losing one million children a year in Africa.”

The International Center for Journalists and Malaria No More provided a travel grant for this report

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Zambia police arrest four suspects for ritual murders that sparked riots

Zambia ritual murders

LUSAKA (Reuters) – Zambia police said on Tuesday four suspects have been arrested in connection with a string of grisly ritual murders in the southern African nation’s capital that triggered anti-foreign riots targeting mostly Rwandan migrants in April.

The arrested suspects are two army soldiers, a civilian employee of the Zambian Air Force and a traditional doctor, police said. They were to appear in court Tuesday afternoon charged with seven counts of murder.

“All the murders which the accused have been charged with were committed in a similar manner by crushing the left side of the head, removing body parts and later dumping the deceased near their homes,” police said in a statement.

Police said in April that the victims had ears, hearts and genitals removed, raising suspicion of ritual killings.

Human body parts are sometimes used in traditional remedies and concoctions in southern Africa. The practice is linked to witchcraft beliefs.

Zambia hosts thousands of refugees from neighboring countries, especially Rwanda and Burundi, but relations between the communities are usually peaceful.

(Reporting by Chris Mfula; Writing by Ed Stoddard; Editing by James Macharia)

Border attack feeds Tunisia fears of Libya jihadist spillover

TUNIS/ALGIERS (Reuters) – The signal to attack came from the mosque, sending dozens of Islamist fighters storming through the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdan to hit army and police posts in street battles that lit the dawn sky with tracer bullets.

Militants used a megaphone to chant “God is Great,” and reassure residents they were Islamic State, there to save the town near the Libyan border from the “tyrant” army. Most were Tunisians themselves, with local accents, and even some familiar faces, officials and witnesses to Monday’s attack said.

Hours later, 36 militants were dead, along with 12 soldiers and seven civilians, in an assault authorities described as an attempt by Islamic State to carve out terrain in Tunisia.

Whether Islamic State aimed to hold territory as they have in Iraq, Syria and Libya, or intended only to dent Tunisia’s already battered security, is unclear and the group has yet to officially claim the attack.

But as fuller details of the Ben Guerdan fighting emerge, the incident highlights the risk Tunisia faces from home-grown jihadists drawn to Iraq, Syria and Libya, and who have threatened to bring their war back home.

Despite Tunisian forces’ preparations to confront returning fighters, and their defeat of militants in Ben Guerdan, Monday’s assault shows how the country is vulnerable to violence spilling over from Libya as Islamic State expands there.

Authorities are still investigating the Ben Guerdan attack. But most of the militants appear to have been already in the town, with a few brought in from Libya. Arms caches were deposited around the city before the assault.

“Most of them were from Ben Guerdan, we know their faces. They knew where to find the house of the counter-terrorist police chief,” one witness, Sabri Ben Saleh, told Reuters. “They were driving round in a car filled with weapons, my neighbors said they knew some of them.”

Troops have killed 14 more militants around Ben Guerdan since Monday. Others have been arrested and more weapons seized.

ISLAMIC STATE

Officials say they are still determining if the militants had been in Libya before or had returned from fighting with Islamic State overseas. But that such a large number of militants and arms were in Tunisia is no surprise.

After its revolt in 2011 to topple Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has struggled with growing Islamic militancy.

More than 3,000 Tunisians have left to fight with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to government estimates. Tunisian security sources say many are with Islamic State in Libya.

Gunmen trained in Libya were blamed for attacks on tourists at the Bardo Museum in Tunis a year ago and at a beach hotel in Sousse in June.

Tunisians also play a major role in Islamic State in Libya where they run training camps, according to Tunisian security sources.

But the scale of Monday’s attack was unprecedented. The militants were well-organized, handing out weapons to their fighters from a vehicle moving through the city, with knowledge of the town and its military barracks.

“We came across a group of terrorists with their Kalashnikovs, and they told us: ‘Don’t worry we are not here to target you. We are the Islamic State and we are here for the tyrants in the army,'” said Hassein Taba, a local resident.

The attack tests Tunisia at a difficult time. After Islamic State violence last year, the tourism industry that represents 7 percent of the economy is struggling to tempt visitors to return.

With its new constitution, free elections and secular history, Tunisia is a target for jihadists looking to upset a young democracy just five years after the overthrow of dictator Ben Ali.

“The battle of Ben Guerdane in Tunisia, 20 miles from the Libyan border … is proof enough that the Islamic State has cells far and wide,” said Geoff Porter, at North Africa Risk Consulting. “But what these cells can reliably do … and how they are directed by Islamic State leadership in Sirte, let alone in Iraq and Syria, is not known.”

AIR STRIKES

Islamic State has grown in Libya over the past year and half, coopting local fighters, battling with rivals and taking over the town of Sirte, now its main base.

That has worried Tunisian authorities, who have built a border trench and tightened controls along nearly 200-km (125 miles) of the frontier with Libya.

Western military experts are training Tunisians to protect a porous border where smuggling has been a long tradition. Ben Guerdan is well-known as a smuggling town.

“There are still some blind spots in intelligence, but they are advancing with the cooperation of neighboring countries and with the West,” said Ali Zarmdini, a Tunisian military analyst.

But Tunisia’s North African neighbors worry about the spill over impact of any further Western air strikes and military action against Islamic State in Libya.

After a U.S. air strike killed 40 mostly Tunisian militants in the Libyan town of Sabratha last month, Tunisian forces went on alert for any cross-border incursions.

Just days before the Ben Guerdan attack, Tunisian troops killed five militants who tried to cross from Libya.

But the fact that even after that setback, militants mustered a force of 50 fighters to strike the town shows the group’s ability to keep testing the Tunisian military.

(Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Where the dead don’t count in Europe’s migration crisis

CATANIA, Italy (Reuters) – Lucky Iz had just turned 15 when he and his friend Godfrey set off to cross the Sahara on a hot August afternoon in 2012. Lucky has still not told Godfrey’s family what happened on the journey towards Europe. This is his account.

The Nigerian boys arrived at the edge of the Sahara with water, biscuits, milk and energy drinks, just as the people-smuggler had instructed them, Lucky recalled. They climbed with 36 others onto the back of a Toyota pickup truck that sped away from Agadez, a city in northern Niger.

Lucky sat atop a pile of supplies, hanging onto a post with his feet dangling over the side. He knew the driver would not stop if anyone fell off. He was parched and hungry. The sand that sprayed up from under the truck’s tires stung his eyes. For three days they drove, stopping occasionally to refuel and drink their water.

On the fourth day, the driver lost his way. His compass had stopped working. Some in the group would never make it out of the desert.

International groups track numbers of migrants who drown crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. Last year an estimated 3,800 people died that way.

But no one counts the dead of the Sahara. This makes it easier for politicians to ignore the lives lost there, humanitarian workers say.

The United Nations refugee agency has no data on how many people die in the desert, according to its North Africa unit. The International Committee of the Red Cross reconnects families, but does not collect information about their dead. A handful of unofficial databases maintained by volunteers, academics and non-governmental organizations have tried to keep count, but they depend largely on media reports, and their funding is sporadic.

“We don’t have any data,” said Julien Brachet, a fellow at Oxford’s International Migration Institute who has been doing field work in the Sahara, including northern Niger, for more than a decade.

“It’s a problem, because there may be as many people dying in the desert as there are in the Mediterranean,” he said. “We can’t prove it, so we can’t say it, so nobody is going to intervene.”

LOST

Agadez has long been a gateway to the desert. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 120,000 migrants passed through the city on their way to North Africa or Europe in 2015, more than twice as many as the previous year. In the past, people would leave the city openly. Weekly military convoys offered some protection.

But since a tragedy in 2013, when 92 desert travelers died of thirst, the government has moved to shut down the routes, and the traffic has become more secretive and hidden.

Lost in the sands, the driver of Lucky’s truck kept going for five more days, hoping to reach a landmark and reorient himself. By then, Lucky said, all the food and water was gone. Exhausted passengers began to fall off the truck at night. The driver did not stop for them.

“The next day, we see ourselves, and we count ourselves and some people are not there anymore,” said Lucky, now 18, who after arriving in Europe lived for a year in a young people’s refuge in Catania, Italy.

A day later, the vehicle ran out of fuel. Helpless, the travelers milled about. That afternoon, a sandstorm barreled towards them.

“We were just standing, looking. We don’t even know where to go,” said Lucky. “We don’t even know how we can go out from the desert. So many people died on that spot.

“My friend fell down and died,” Lucky said. Everyone was crying.

“We didn’t know who was going to die next. We don’t know who is going to give up next. So what do you do? The whole place was sand, so we had to dig out the sand with our hands and we buried him.

“Then we started walking.”

UNDER COVER

The Sahara in northern Niger and neighboring Mali is home to drugs and arms traffickers, people-smugglers, kidnappers and armed Islamist militant groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda.

The European Union has put Niger and other countries under pressure to crack down on smuggling. In 2014, the EU opened a mission in Niger to train the security forces to “help prevent irregular migration.” Last year, Niger passed a law banning people-smuggling that could see smugglers jailed for up to 30 years.

But Brachet says that may have been counter-productive because it pushed much of the trade underground.

“It used to be, not impossible, but very difficult for somebody to abandon migrants in the middle of the desert,” said Brachet. “Now, as it’s clandestine, nobody knows if you really reach the point where you were supposed to drop your passengers off or not, or if you left them in the desert.”

An EU official said it is a priority to tackle people-smugglers and others who put the lives of vulnerable migrants at risk: The bloc does not control borders or patrol in the desert, but supports the authorities with training and advice.

The IOM, which has staff in northern Niger, is trying to gather better information about how many people move through the region, and what happens to them. It estimates that some 2,300 people pass through Agadez each week. But it recorded only 37 deaths in the Sahara in 2015.

Last March, IOM staff visited Seguidine, a small village in Niger close to the Libyan border. In one day they found 85 migrants stranded, waiting under trees, abandoned by smugglers, said Giuseppe Loprete, head of the group’s mission in Niger.

“The journey is very difficult,” said Loprete. “From what they tell us, the stories, a lot of people die on the route.”

The government of Niger did not respond to requests for comment.

Lucky said he and the other survivors walked for about 10 hours before they ran into a pickup truck on its way back to Agadez. They pleaded with the driver to take them the rest of the way.

He drove them to Sabha in Libya and sold them to militants who forced Lucky to work for free. It would be months before he could escape and make his way to Italy.

They left behind four men and two women in the sand – six more deaths that were never recorded.

(Gebrekidan reported from Catania, Martell from New York; Additional reporting by Masako Melissa Hirsch in New York, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Abdoulaye Massalaki in Niamey; Edited by Sara Ledwith)

U.S. training African police to counter new jihadist threats

THIES, Senegal (Reuters) – Ahead of a drill to teach West African police about forensics by blowing up a car filled with crash test dummies posing as suicide bombers, FBI agents met an unexpected question: why bother to investigate if the militants are already dead?

The query from a Senegalese officer demonstrates the steep learning curve for the region’s security forces if they are to keep pace with increasingly brazen and sophisticated jihadists moving in from the north-central Sahara and possibly Libya.

Since Islamic State’s entry into Libya last year, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has responded with a series of attacks to bolster its claim of primacy in the western Sahara.

Western governments worry the Islamic State presence in Africa may lead to ties with West Africa’s Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to the group last year, and could herald a drive south. Some al Qaeda-linked brigades also appear to be merging.

Reflecting the changing threat and after major attacks in the last four months in Mali and Burkina Faso in which at least 50 people, including many Westerners, were killed, this year’s annual “Flintlock” counter-terrorism exercises have included police training for the first time.

Recent West African efforts have revealed blunders, security sources say.

So many people touched an assault rifle used by militants in the Bamako attack, for example, that it was impossible to take fingerprints.

In January, an AQIM death row fugitive who fled Mauritania via Senegal was able to travel 300 miles before being stopped in Guinea, acquiring arms and accomplices on the way, thanks in part to bungled communication between Senegalese and Mauritanian officials, a Senegalese security source said.

U.S. experts say three main shortfalls need to be addressed: intelligence, cross-border cooperation and reaction times.

“In most African countries the capacity to respond to these sorts of incidents is middle-of-the-road at best,” said a senior U.S. military officer, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of his remarks.

“But they are very eager to learn.”

NEW TECHNIQUES

Security experts report a growing sophistication since last year in the tactics and weaponry used by AQIM and associated groups, which they say may be born of competition with Islamic State.

An armored suicide truck, albeit a makeshift one, was used in an attack on a U.N. base in Kidal in northern Mali that killed seven peacekeepers this month.

Boko Haram suicide vests now often include hidden cell phones so they can be remotely detonated and increasingly resemble those used in the Middle East, weapons experts say.

Until last year, desert militants, aiming by moonlight, had fired rockets from far away and mostly missed their targets.

As the threat grows, there are signs the U.S. is increasing its commitments.

Already, there are up to 1,200 special operations forces on the continent, providing training, operating drones and, very rarely, intervening directly such as in the Ouagadougou siege.

Last week, the U.S. launched its second set of air strikes in Libya in three months in what risk management consultancy Signal Risk’s director Ryan Cummings called a “point of departure” from a strategy previously characterized by a limited appetite for offensive roles in Africa.

Washington is proposing $200 million in new military spending for North and West Africa. Both the United States and France, which has 3,500 troops in the region, intend to boost support to regional security body Group of Five Sahel, diplomats and officials say.

Three sources familiar with the agreement told Reuters that the United States and Senegal had agreed a new accord granting rights to establish a base here in case of an emergency.

Intelligence sharing among the different countries of West Africa will be key, security officials said.

The United States plans to set up the first of many “intelligence fusion” centers at the headquarters for a regional anti-Boko Haram task force in Chad to allow countries to share sensitive information in a secure environment.

“If we continue to invest in the development of regional platforms, it will pay huge dividends over the next year, but it cannot be done without a comprehensive approach,” said Commander for Special Operations Command Africa Brigadier General Donald Bolduc.

Overcoming suspicions between neighbors and historic rivals will be a challenge, however.

“The sharing of intelligence between neighbors is not where it should be and this is critically important,” said a Western intelligence source at Flintlock.

(Writing by Emma Farge; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

U.S. military seeks to prepare Africa for shifting terror threat

THIES, Senegal (Reuters) – African forces began a U.S.-led counter-terrorism training program in Senegal on Monday amid what a U.S. commander said were rising signs of collaboration between Islamist militant groups across north Africa and the Sahel.

The annual “Flintlock” exercises started only weeks after an attack in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou left 30 people dead. The assault on a hotel used by foreigners raised concerns that militants were expanding from a stronghold in north Mali toward stable, Western allies like Senegal.

Al Qaeda (AQIM) fighters claimed responsibility for the attack, one of increasingly bold regional strikes in the Sahel, a poor, arid zone between the Sahara Desert and Sudanian Savanna that is home to a number of roving militant groups.

U.S. Commander for Special Operations Command Africa Brigadier General Donald Bolduc told reporters on Monday that increased collaboration between militant groups meant they have been able to strengthen and strike harder in the region.

“We have watched that collaboration manifest itself with ISIS becoming more effective in north Africa, Boko Haram becoming more deadly in the Lake Chad Basin (and) AQIM adopting asymmetrical attacks … against urban infrastructure,” he said. ISIS, or ISIL, is used for the militant group Islamic State.

Bolduc said that cooperation had increased as Islamic State exploited a power vacuum in Libya to expand its self-declared caliphate, which takes up large areas in Syria and Iraq.

“We know in Libya that they (AQIM and ISIS) are working more closely together. It’s more than just influence, they (AQIM) are really taking direction from them,” he said.

Not all security experts agree that there are emerging alliances between Islamist militant groups. Some argue that competition between groups has led to more attacks.

This year’s program, which opened on a dusty airstrip in Senegal’s central city of Thies, involves around 1,700 mostly African special operation forces. Western partners including France and Germany are among more than 30 countries participating.

Nathan Broshear, spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, said the exercises were called Flintlock, after a type of firearm, to symbolize readiness for any threat.

Bolduc stressed the importance of regional cooperation and intelligence-sharing and said the United States would help Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon set up a joint intelligence center by the middle of next year.

The United States already supports a regional task force against the Nigeria-based group Boko Haram.

The Ouagadougou attack and a hotel attack in Mali’s capital in November led to a greater emphasis on preparing for urban attacks this year through training to increase cooperation between military forces and police.

At the request of African partners, the exercises will also include anti-Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) training.

The program, an annual event since 2005, will run from February 8 through 29. Some exercises will also be held in Mauritania.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

In southern Africa, an illusion built on aid heralds hope and hunger

LILONGWE (Reuters) – As she walks along a dirt road in central Malawi, Louise Abale carries her precious maize wrapped in a brightly coloured cloth and balanced on her head.

Because of drought in Malawi and across southern Africa the grain has doubled in price in the space of a year, and now costs around 200 kwacha ($0.28) a kilo.

Like many, Abale is struggling to pay for maize, a staple of the diet, and says her own – stunted – crop will not be ready for harvest for two months. “It’s too expensive, I have almost no money,” she said.

In all 2.8 million people in Malawi, or 17 percent of the population, now face hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Drought and floods have hit the maize crop, exposing the fragility of gains which had seen Malawi’s rates of malnutrition slashed in the past two decades.

That progress was partly rooted in a fertilizer grant for small-scale farmers. But now the government, starved of donor funds following a graft scandal over two years ago, can ill afford such payments and says it must scale down the program.

Ironically, policies aimed at ensuring basic food security are partly to blame for a cycle of rural poverty and aid dependency in this land-locked African nation, leaving the population vulnerable to climate shocks, economists say.

“There is no doubt that the fertilizer subsidy was only feasible due to donor support,” said Ed Hobey, an analyst at Africa Risk Consulting. “At best, it was unsustainable without continued donor support, at worst, it was an illusion built on aid.”

Launched in 2005, the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) provides qualifying farmers – those with limited income but a plot of productive land – with two coupons which can be redeemed for two 50-kg bags of fertilizer. The recipients make a modest contribution, with the government footing most of the bill.

Because the government is subsidizing the production of maize – the main source of calories for many poor households – it also bans the export of the grain.

The program is credited by the government and some aid agencies with lifting maize production and cutting hunger.

The data appear to back that up.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the percentage of Malawi’s malnourished population fell to 21.8 percent in 2012-14 from 45 percent two decades earlier.

But FISP’s role here is difficult to untangle as most of those gains were made before 2005. Still, there is evidence of benefits, including indirect ones.

Stunting among Malawi children – a key nutrition measure – fell to 42.4 percent in 2014 from 49 percent in 2002.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

But the program has also had unintended consequences.

The focus on food security, including the ban on maize exports, has discouraged investment in more productive commercial farming methods.

“Our concern with the export ban is that it limits the scope to expand production among more medium and large-scale farms if they are unable to market the surplus,” said Richard Record, World Bank Senior Country Economist, World Bank in Malawi.

In the long run such a ban stunts food production, especially in an age of increasingly high-tech farming, economists say.

FISP also diverted state funds from other areas.

In all, FISP has accounted for as much as 9 percent of government expenditure and over half the agricultural budget, leaving scant funds to invest in rural transport links and other projects that would benefit the countryside.

“The FISP was not matched by increased investment in rural infrastructure especially roads and irrigation,” said Hobey of Africa Risk Consulting.

This retards development of other sectors in the farm value chain, such as canning, which can kick-start industrialization, economists and analysts say.

Initially FISP met its objective: providing calories to the rural poor. Between 2007 and 2014 Malawi produced bumper maize crops, with surpluses recorded since 2007 – until last year.

A study in the “The American Journal of Agricultural Economics” found a 15 percent boost in maize production under FISP coincided with a 15 percent decrease in the amount of land devoted to the grain.

This suggests small-scale farmers diversified to cash crops such as tobacco and cotton.

DONOR DROUGHT DRAINS FISP COFFERS

Today FISP is no longer viable, government officials and analysts say.

Donor funds for the budget have dried up in the wake of a scandal over two years ago dubbed “cashgate”, in which state officials siphoned millions of dollars.

“We are going to have to be scaling down expenditure on FISP, we are reacting to diminishing resources of funds for the budget,” Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe told Reuters.

Belt tightening is underway, though the number of FISP recipients has remained unchanged at 1.5 million.

Instead of paying 500 Malawian kwacha ($0.70) toward the two 50 kg bags of fertilizer subsidised, Gondwe said farmers would now pay 3,500 kwacha. The cost of a bag is around 20,000 kwacha.

Several subsistence farmers interviewed by Reuters in their fields said they could not afford the 3,500 kwacha, let alone the full cost.

The price for fertilizer has surged as it is imported and the kwacha has been sliding against the dollar, losing 63 percent in the past 12 months.

Gondwe said the program this financial year would cost 54 billion kwacha instead of an original estimate of 40 billion, plus an additional 8 billion rand for seeds.

INDIVIDUAL SUCCESSES

To be sure, FISP has helped individual farmers, such as Salome Banda. Five years ago, Banda made the transition from subsistence farming to producing a surplus of maize for market because she received the grant once.

“I have not had it since 2010 but I can buy my own fertilizer now,” she told Reuters as she stood proudly by 50 kg bags of her maize stacked in a warehouse north of Lilongwe. She said one FISP grant tripled her production that season.

For others, the benefits have not translated into such gains and even Banda, while she produces surpluses, has hardly made the leap to more productive, technical farming.

“When I got FISP, I fed all my children,” said Matezenji Watsoni, a 35-year-old mother of seven, as she waited outside a World Food Programme relief station in a rural Lilongwe suburb for a 50 kg bag of maize.

“But this is the third year I have not had it, and it has brought hunger to my house,” she said.

This year a perfect storm is brewing after a decade of maize surpluses turned into a deficit of 225,000 tonnes in 2015, in a country that consumes 3 million tonnes annually. The harvest this season looks set to be even worse.

RURAL TILL THE COWS COME HOME

Another unintended outcome of the FISP is that by subsidizing peasant farming, people have an incentive to remain on the land, adding to rural population pressures.

Late rains have clothed central regions in simmering shades of green but this idyllic image belies the late start to the summer planting season and the grinding poverty of rain-fed, hand tilled agriculture.

Malawi, which has done little to industrialize, is also barely urban. In 1990, 88 percent of the population was rural, a number that was 84 percent in 2014, according to World Bank data. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is 63 percent rural.

Asked about industrialization, finance minister Gondwe, a jovial septuagenarian, looked almost bemused.

“It will take time to industrialize. But don’t forget this country cannot even make a needle. So to base your policy on that probably is asking too much.”

(Additional reporting by Eldson Chagara; Editing by James Macharia and Janet McBride)

UNICEF: Adolescent AIDS deaths have tripled since 2000

The number of adolescents who have died from AIDS has tripled in the past 15 years, and the disease is the second-leading cause of death in the age 10-19 population across the globe.

That’s according to data released Friday by the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, which added that the disease is the top killer for adolescents who are living in Africa. The organization, known more commonly as UNICEF, said adolescents are the only group that has not seen a drop in death rates in the past 15 years despite advances in disease prevention and treatment.

UNICEF said most of its data indicates most of the adolescents who are dying were infected with the disease when they were infants, when the treatments that help prevent infected pregnant mothers from passing the disease onto their children were not as common as they are today.

The UNICEF data showed that about 1.3 million children have been spared from the disease since 2000, largely thanks to improvements in mother-to-child transmission prevention. It said 60 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women get medicine to prevent AIDS from spreading.

Despite those advances, the organization noted some shortfalls for the adolescent age group.

UNICEF said only one-third of the 2.6 million children under 15 who are living with AIDS are treated for the infection. It also announced that only 11 percent of 15-to-19-year-olds are tested for the disease in sub-Saharan Africa, where the infection rate is the most prevalent.

The disease also remains a problem for those who are not born with it.

UNICEF’s data showed that 26 new 15-to-19-year-olds become infected with the disease every hour, and 40 percent of those occur outside sub-Saharan Africa. The Associated Press reported that the United States, India, Indonesia and Brazil all had a “worrying rate” of teen infection.

UNICEF called for worldwide solutions that provide early diagnosis for babies (less than half of children are tested before they are two months old, and AIDS progresses quickly in newborns). It also seeks to keep women, children and adolescents treated and improve sex education.

U.N. Claims 1.4 Million Children Have Fled Boko Haram

The United Nations says that over 1.4 million children have fled Nigeria and surrounding countries to try and escape Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.

UNICEF says that 1.2 million Nigerian children have fled from the northern part of the country and around 265,000 children have fled border towns in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

“It’s truly alarming to see that children and women continue to be killed, abducted and used to carry bombs,” said Manuel Fontaine, the UNICEF regional director for West and Central Africa.

UNICEF also reported on their efforts to help those children. The report stated:

  • Over 315,000 children have been vaccinated against measles;
  • More than 200,000 people have received access to safe water;
  • Almost 65,000 displaced and refugee children have had access to education and are able to continue their learning thanks to the delivery of school materials;
  • Nearly 72,000 displaced children have received counselling and psychosocial support;
  • Almost 65,000 children under 5 have received treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

The U.N. officials also focused on Boko Haram’s targeting of women and girls in their terror assaults and kidnappings.

“Women and girls are involved in approximately three-quarters of the attacks,” she said. And children are “used, often without knowing, to carry bombs that were strapped to their bodies and detonated remotely in public places.”