Photography
More than 420,000 people have fled across the border as attacks by militias in West Darfur continue. Another 200,000 people are expected to follow. Yet, says one refugee, ‘the international community does nothing’.
To see the 20 pictures and read the stories of Darfuri refugees, click here.
One of the photos I recently took in eastern Chad is in this week's edition of The Economist.
Their correspondent, Kinley Salmon, also traveled to the camps on the border with Darfur, where Sudanese refugees tell horrific stories of rape and murder.
His report can also be read online, by clicking on this link.
In southern Madagascar, children get mica from handmade mines, photographer Arie Kievit saw when he was there with children’s rights NGO Terre des Homes. Plate mica as a raw material is indispensable for our cars and electrical appliances. I interviewed Kievit for today’s edition of De Volkskrant.
Mediastorm, a television programme about media logic and stories behind the news, asked me to talk about my day to day work in African countries. How do you take pictures in an IDP camp where many people are suffering? And how is the way we perceive Africa linked to the small amount of correspondents that are active on the continent? I tried to answer some of these questions in Mediastorm, which was aired last Saturday.
Millions of people are facing severe hunger as a result of the worst drought in 40 years in the Horn of Africa. For 8 days, I traveled through the country for Dutch and international media and what we witnessed was heartbreaking and harrowing. People have lost everything because of the drought, children die because of malnutrition.
As the situation deteriorates, aid agencies fear that a focus on the Ukraine crisis is likely to overwhelm the agenda and donors at a critical time for the East African country of Somalia in particular. According to a statement by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, only 3.2 percent ($47.1m) of the required funding ($1.5bn) for its humanitarian response plan has been received so far.
The Guardian: ‘There is not enough food. The situation is dire’: Somalia’s drought crisis
Der Spiegel: With the World's Attention on Ukraine, Suffering Is Rising Elsewhere
Der Spiegel (pictures): Dürre und Hungersnot in Somalia: Nie wieder – hieß es vor zehn Jahren
NPO Radio 1 (Met Het Oog Op Morgen): Hongersnood dreigt voor miljoenen mensen in Hoorn van Afrika
VICE World News: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Is Putting Millions of Lives at Risk in Somalia
El País: Somalia se quiebra por la sequía histórica y la invasión rusa de Ucrania
NPO Radio 1 (Humberto): Droogte in Hoorn van Afrika, 500.000 Somaliërs ontheemd
Al Jazeera English: Drought in Somalia worsened by funding gap, Ukraine war
De Morgen: De vergeten hongersnood in Somalië. ‘Door de droogte zijn we alles kwijtgeraakt’
The New York Times: how the ongoing drought is affecting kids in Somalia
Trouw published a four page story I wrote about the drought in Somalia.
Dutch comedian Dolf Jansen showed some of my pictures in Dutch talkshow Khalid & Sophie.
In ‘Crisis Update’, a webcast by refugee organization Stichting Vluchteling that focuses on the conflict in Tigray, I spoke about our trip to the refugee camps in Eastern Sudan. In conversation with Dutch presenter Hadassah de Boer, I shared some insights on what it was like to work there. Check out the whole interview below.
A bit more than a year after billions of locusts invaded East Africa, locust hunters have now built a system to beat the ferocious insects that are threatening livelihoods across the region. According to the FAO, the operation can almost be declared as a success.
In Northern Kenya, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN has teamed up with the private sector, community elders and the Kenyan government to fight desert locusts that came flying from the Arabic peninsula.
In densely populated areas, the locust control operation should be done from the ground, where scouts are spraying pesticides from special backpacks, or from spraying installations built on the back of pickups. But in the vast plains and forests of Northern Kenya, this is not possible. And so surveillance helicopters are deployed from several smaller airfields. The data is then gathered in one large system in the so-called joint operation control center, where experts can decide where the specially equipped spray planes should fly to.
“Last year, we did not have any data,” says Casper Sitemba, FAO representative. “When we started, individuals were making phone calls reporting sightings of locusts. But in this campaign, we have used a lot of technology to address the data gaps that existed before. We have built several applications and through them, we have been able to collect massive amounts of data. Right now, our control effort success rate is almost 86%. We are now able to measure that success — last year, we didn’t even know how many swarms there were and where they were when the invasion stated.”
According to the FAO, the operation in Northern Kenya has been “very successful”. Sitemba: “As of now, we are down to the last few swarms in Kenya. And these are not even really swarms, they are what we call ‘swarmlets’, groups of locusts that have broken away from the larger swarms. They can be 20 to 30 hectares big, where last year we had swarms as big as 3,000 hectares. We are downscaling the operation, as the situation improved manifold, but we remain vigilant as we are approaching the rainy season.”
Read the full piece and check out all photos on the El País website (also in Spanish)!
“I flew directly to Tigray. At Mekele airport, there were soldiers everywhere, even on the runway. They don't do anything, but they are there. On the way to the city, you will pass multiple checkpoints. As a Westerner, you are immediately singled out and questioned about what you’re doing here. They want to make sure that you’re not a journalist, because they do not tolerate prying eyes,” says ZOA’s emergency coordinator Hielke Zantema.
Dutch newspaper Trouw interviewed two Dutch aid workers who recently worked in Tigray, where the fight continues unabated. But no one knows exactly what is happening in the Ethiopian region. Click here to read the story.
New work for Dutch newspaper Trouw:
It has been forbidden to hunt for Ivory Coast's pangolins since 1974, but the law has never been maintained. Now it is known that the coronavirus may have been transmitted from animals onto humans through a pangolin, Ivorians are fighting for a ban. But it's not easy.
Now that Ahmed Fofana, 21, is out of work because of the coronavirus pandemic, his grandfather's old shotgun comes in handy. For years it lay in pieces in the shed. "It was no longer used," said Fofana, who took the time to give the weapon a second life. Black, wrapped tape and some simple welding now hold the long barrel and wooden butt together.
Almost every day at dusk, he walks out of his village, the rifle in his hand. Agou, a small town in the southeastern department of Adzopé (Ivory Coast), is surrounded by forests and fields. It's an ideal hunting ground. In the 'brousse', as Ivorians describe wild natural areas, Fofana hunts for his next meal. He sums up the animals he encounters: "Gazelles, deer, hedgehogs, rats, pangolins, snakes". If it's edible, he shoots it.
He prefers to do something else for a living. "But I have no choice," he explains. Due to the corona virus, he lost his job as a moped taxi driver last year. "As the man of the house, it is my job to find food for my family." Read the whole story, by Saskia Houttuin, by following this link.
Spanish newspaper El País published some of the pictures I took of Nice Nailantei Leng’ete, who is fighting ancient Maasai traditions in order to put a stop to female genital mutilation, also known as ‘The Cut’. El País focused on her work and published some of the pictures I took of Nice and her grandfather, when I worked on assignment for Amref Health Africa.
To see more pictures in their slideshow, follow this link to the El País ‘Planeta Futuro’ website. To read the (Spanish) article about Nice, click here.
Fleeing the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, tens of thousands of people walked days to get to neighboring Sudan, where they are staying in crowded refugee settlements. On assignment for British newspaper The Telegraph, I traveled with Africa correspondents Saskia Houttuin and Will Brown to eastern Sudan, where we were some of the first journalists to talk to refugees.
The Tigrayans told us horrifying stories, about indiscriminate bombings, machete attacks, decapitations and executions. But it’s hard to check if their stories are true, as in Tigray, the electricity and communication services have been cut off for weeks. On top of that, journalists are not allowed to enter the region to do their work independently. And so the only way to get an idea of what might have happened in Northern Ethiopia, is to talk to the many refugees that we found in the camps.
To read some of the stories that Will and Saskia wrote for their newspapers, click through the screenshots below. To read the story I wrote for Trouw’s De Verdieping segment, click here. To hear the radio interview I did for ‘Met Het Oog Op Morgen’, in conversation with Wilfried de Jong, click here. To hear the conversation I had in the ‘NOS Radio 1 Journaal’ with Jurgen van den Berg, together with Africa correspondent Bram Vermeulen, click play on the video underneath the newspaper clippings (or click here). To listen to NOS podcast ‘De Dag’ about the situation in the Sudanese camps, click play on the player below.
In addition to the work I did for The Telegraph, NOS and Trouw, I also worked for NGOs, who are working on the ground to help the Ethiopian refugees. To see some of the work I did for World Food Programme (WFP), click here. The photos I took for Save The Children can be seen here. To see the video interviews and pictures I created for Dutch refugee NGO Stichting Vluchteling, click here. And to see the pictures I took for ZOA, click here.
I’m very happy to share that The Guardian published twelve pictures I took in Samburu, in the photo essay section of their website. The story that goes with all photographs, about worries over Samburu’s children who might not return to school as they are once again living a traditional way of life, was written by Saskia Houttuin.
See the whole photo essay here, on the website of The Guardian.
Click here to read more about our frontpage coverage about Samburu for NRC Handelsblad.
“Ivory Coast is divided,” says Judicaël Yao (who wears a black cap), the coordinator for RHDP Yamoussoukro. “But even about Jesus Christ, people were not unanimous.” Judicaël's party leader and current president Alassane Ouattara decided to run for a third term, but opposition leaders say that this decision is unconstitutional. And so the opposition has urged voters to boycot the elections of upcoming Saturday.
In Ivory Coast’s capital Yamoussoukro, followers of Ouattara aren’t bothered by the claims of the opposition, as they put up posters of Ouattara as if the elections are running in a normal fashion. “Today, we believe that for the majority of Ivorians, those who want the happiness of our people, president Ouattara is the man who is needed,” Judicaël says. "In nine years, he has transformed Ivory Coast.” Ouattara has been praised for Ivory Coast’s economic growth: the average gross domestic product has grown around 8% per year since he came to power in 2011.
Still, Ivory Coast is on edge, and tensions are high. Fears of instability in the country rise, as electoral violence has already led to sixteen deaths in Abou, a commercial district 50 kilometers from Abidjan. The memories of post-election violence in 2010 and 2011, that killed some 3,000 people, are still fresh.
To learn about the elections, check out our reportage for RTL Nieuws or read Saskia Houttuin’s article for Dutch daily Trouw. To see some additional photography and reporting for VPRO, click here.
