World on the move: research on refugees, migration & conflict

“Syrian refugees are not dying from pneumonia, they’re dying from diabetes and heart problems”, says Jon Gunnarsson of Médecins Sans Frontières. “Seventy-seven per cent of all mortality is due to non-communicable disease.”   Gunnarson, who works with refugees in Jordan, says that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) represent one of the most urgent yet underfunded health crises facing Syrian refugees displaced by the country’s civil war.

There are 600,000 Syrian refugees registered in Jordan, 84 per cent of them living outside refugee camps. Many are afflicted by NCDs such as hypertension, heart disease, asthma, smoking-related illnesses, and diabetes — indeed the Middle East and North Africa region has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world, Gunnarsson says. These conditions are exacerbated by risk factors linked to the stress and trauma of displacement, as well as lack of access to treatment. For example, smoking and inactive lifestyles are widespread among those displaced, while high rates of depression can make treatment adherence more difficult for patients, he says.


So great is the problem, that MSF – an organisation that does not usually focus on NCDs – has been building NCD clinics and testing out new treatment programmes for refugees. Underpinning these is a ‘patient-centred model of care’, that includes health education, counselling, peer support sessions and motivational interviewing. 

In this interview, Gunnarsson, who heads up an NCD nurse team in Irbid province in northern Jordan, explains why NCD care is so effective and vital for Syrian refugees, and outlines some of the results from their work in Jordan. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/treating-diseases-killing-syrian-refugees.html


New ways to treat the diseases killing Syrian refugees

In 2002, after decades of war followed by Taliban oppression, Afghanistan’s university system was in tatters, says Osman Babury, the nation’s deputy minister of higher education, in this audio interview. Just 7,000 students were enrolled in university — and all of them male as the Taliban restricted female education. Thirteen years later, there are over 300,000 students in higher education, 50,000 of them women.

But the path to a fully functioning higher education system remains beset by challenges. Persistent conflict, political volatility and the threat of Taliban attacks — including on universities themselves — make providing higher education a struggle. 

Stress and mental health problems stemming from long-term exposure to war and oppressive regimes affect huge numbers of Afghan students. And as universities in Afghanistan and worldwide increasingly become targets for extremist attacks — the devastating Garissa attack in Kenya in April being the most recent high-profile example — giving students and staff training in how to deal with these threats becomes ever more vital, Babury says. 

In this interview, Babury discusses these and other challenges, and suggests ways to tackle them head-on.

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global conference on international education, in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/afghan-universities-violence-war-conflict.html

Building Afghan universities in the face of violence

Students in Gaza face near insurmountable barriers to university education, explains Suheil Tarazi, programme manager for the British Council in Gaza, in this audio interview. Persistent conflict, buildings destroyed by bombing, a lack of funding and equipment, a student body traumatised by years of violence and war, and the world’s lowest employment rate are just some of the devastating conditions students and teachers experience each day. 

July 8 marks a year since the beginning of the seven-week war that left nearly 2,200 people dead — over 2,100 of them Palestinians in Gaza. Like many Gazans, Tarazi says, a huge number of students and lecturers lost their homes and family members in the 2014 conflict, adding to those already traumatised and displaced.

Against this backdrop, Tarazi says scholarships to study abroad can be lifelines for students, with many going on to return home to help develop universities in Gaza. 

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global 2015 conference on international education in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/education-lifelines-palestinian-students-gaza.html

Photo credit: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan

Education lifelines for Palestinian students in Gaza

It is just over a year since the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIS, declared its ‘Caliphate’ in the Middle East, after capturing vast tracts of Iraq and Syria. Today, ISIS retains its bloody grip on the region and, with no end in sight for the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, volatility in the Middle East is giving the group a dangerous territorial advantage.

But while governments thrash out strategies to rein in ISIS territorially, there is another sphere where its influence is largely unchecked — the internet. The group’s flood of propaganda videos and social media posts demonstrate a level of media production and internet savvy that have stunned its opponents.

In this audio interview, we speak to Nico Prucha and Ali Fisher, two researchers of jihadist digital tactics. They explain how ISIS’s ‘media mujahideen’ use mobile phones and HD cameras to create films that take viewers “right into the middle of the heat”.

The group’s media mujahideen are also masters of digital distribution. Fisher says this is based on a strategy centred around speed, agility and resilience. By tapping into global networks of supporters across different social media platforms, ISIS safeguards itself against the loss of individual accounts, making its online dominance hard to break, he says.

Fisher calls for a more strategic approach to reduce ISIS’s online influence by inhibiting the group’s networks as a whole, rather than stepping in to close sites after they have posted ISIS videos. This will demand global partnerships across governments, technology platforms, academic disciplines and civil society. For example, Prucha explains how a project that brings together academics, anti-extremism activists and a Sunni Muslim organisation in Indonesia aims to both compete directly with ISIS’s attempts to tarnish the name of Sunni Islam and to present an alternative, positive picture of Islam.


Radical strategies to counter ISIS’s online onslaught

Hear how a Swedish social enterprise is producing innovative housing to meet the needs of the displaced. 

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, which killed more than 20 people, including UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injured many more. The United Nations has designated tomorrow as World Humanitarian Day, to recognise those caught up in humanitarian catastrophes and those who work to support them. 

In this audio interview, we talk to Johan Karlsson, head of business development at Better Shelter. This Swedish social enterprise designs safe and robust shelters for refugees across the world. Karlsson says such products are an important evolution in emergency shelter, bringing dignity and safety to refugees in some of the world’s most insecure places. At the centre of the project is the idea of democratic design. Technical testing, pilot and field trials, and feedback workshops bring refugees into the design process, ensuring their practical, social and cultural concerns are heard and integrated in the shelters’ design.

The shelters are now being used in Ethiopia, Iraq and Nepal. And they can be more than homes: through use as buildings such as health clinics, women’s centres, and children’s play spaces, they can meet the many needs of those displaced from their homes. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/refugee-shelter-redesigned.html


Refugee shelter redesigned

This week the UN released a report revealing that 17,000 homes and other buildings in part of the occupied Palestinian West Bank known as Area C are under threat of demolition by Israel. It reiterates the shocking vulnerability of Palestinians living in Area C, which covers 60 per cent of the West Bank and is under full Israeli control.

Life in Area C can be brutal for Palestinians. The UN reports that over 70 per cent of communities are not connected to the water grid, many have no electricity, and around six thousand people live within Israeli ‘firing zones’ used by the military. An Israeli-Palestinian NGO sets up small-scale renewable energy and clean water systems for Palestinians living high in the hills of Mount Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Elad Orian, the cofounder of Comet-ME, tells me “the Israeli authorities have been trying for a long while to drive these people off their land”. Withholding energy and water is part of this “political campaign”, he says.

The off-grid energy systems Comet-ME builds tap into this arid region’s intense sunshine and strong winds to produce clean, sustainable energy for homesteads and villages. As Orian explains in this audio interview, access to a small amount of energy each day can transform lives and livelihoods, particularly for women, who carry out the bulk of domestic tasks and who take care of cheese production that is the staple of livelihoods here. 


Battle for basic services in occupied Palestine

Many of the bombs now maiming and killing civilians in Syria and Yemen began their lives far away from the urban battlefields of the Middle East, in the weapons labs of the West. And many of the deals that provided the weapons used in these bombing campaigns will have been sealed at an arms fair that occurs every two years in London, United Kingdom.

Today is the last day of the 2015 Defence and Security Exhibition International (DSEI), one of the world’s largest arms fairs, and a core part of this lucrative trade. In 2013, global military spending was over US$1,700 billion — over 12 times the US$135 billion spent on official development assistance that year. In many low- and middle-income countries, military spending soaks up a staggeringly large part of national spending: 19 per cent in Pakistan, 14 per cent in Angola, 13 per cent in Colombia and ten per cent in Nigeria, according to World Bank data for 2012. 

To find out more about the humanitarian impact of the weapons changing hands in London this week, I spoke to Thomas Nash, director of Article 36, a London-based NGO. He describes the fair as “a stain on the public conscience for the UK”, and calls for countries complicit in arming other nations to take action to protect the refugees now fleeing the wars in which they are used. Last week, the BBC reported that many of the weapons and aircraft used by the Saudi-led coalition to bomb Yemen were supplied by US and UK companies, including US-made cluster bombs, a munition widely condemned for its devastating impact on civilians.
 
DSEI is organised with financial and logistical support from the UK government’s trade and investment department. The 30,000 people attending the event include 150 government delegations invited by the UK government. Among them are countries responsible for civilian casualties and human rights abuses now and in the recent past: Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among others.

Nash also spoke about the patchy and inadequate review process for weapons. Unlike the rigorous testing process used to develop drugs, cars and most consumer goods, “there’s virtually no public scrutiny of the process of developing and fielding new weapons”, he says. This lack of scrutiny means new weapons hit the market that can cause widespread devastation to civilian populations. Had proper review processes been in place, Nash says, the introduction of deadly weapons such as armed unmanned drones, anti-personnel mines and cluster bombs might have been avoided. 
http://www.scidev.net/global/conflict/multimedia/making-a-killing-human-cost-of-the-global-arms-trade.html

Making a killing: Human cost of the global arms trade

The contrast between the passionate ideals of the UN International Day of Peace this week (21 September) and the tragic reality of world politics in the closing months of 2015 couldn’t be starker. In 2014 180,000 people were killed in conflicts – over three times the number killed in 2010. In June the UN reported that 60 million people are now displaced from their homes — more than at any point since records began. Of the 19 million refugees, half are children. These are brutal, shameful statistics — each number representing a life destroyed or damaged, a family blown apart. Today, "strenthening the ideals of peace, within and among all nations and peoples" — as the UN said 21 September should be used for back in 1981 — feels more beyond our grasp than ever. 

In this audio interview, we speak to Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will, a disarmament research and advocacy programme at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest women’s peace organisation in the world. She talks about the link between deadly technologies, the global arms trade and the wars now raging around the world, and the importance of public and political recognition of the connections between weapons sales and the growing refugee crisis.   

Acheson discusses the gendered impacts of weapons — from the role of small firearms in sexual and gender-based violence, to the ways nuclear radiation affects women and men’s bodies differently. She explains how social constructions of gender and gender roles can “reinforce the sense of men as militants, reinforcing violent masculinities, and undermining women.” And she explains why it so important to get more women around the table during peacebuilding discussions — not only to promote gender equality and break down essentialist ideas of masculine and feminine characteristics, but also to ensure the practical knowledge women often have about the mechanics of their communities feed into and shape agreements to build a more socially relevant, robust, and lasting peace.   

http://www.scidev.net/global/conflict/multimedia/women-deadly-tech-war-refugees.html


Women should be at the heart of peacebuilding talks

Thomas Nash, director of Article 36, explains the impact of cluster bombs on human beings and why systematic clearance operations are so vital. 

Full article: http://www.scidev.net/global/conflict/analysis-blog/view-on-private-sector-media-map-cluster-bomb-legacy.html 

The impact of cluster bombs on humans, and how to clear them

Thomas Nash, director of Article 36, discusses how by monitoring media reports of bombing and rocket artillery, organisations can track where explosive weapons and cluster munitions have been used and build maps of affected areas. 

The use of media monitoring to map explosive weapon use

The difference between emergency and post-disaster shelter for people affected by war has become increasingly blurred over the past few decades, explains Sultan Barakat, founding director of the Post-War Reconstruction Unit at the University of York, United Kingdom, in this audio interview with Imogen Mathers. He discusses the complex politics of refugee response and humanitarian solutions, and how the protracted nature of many contemporary wars is making crisis-affected people even more vulnerable. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/feature/shelter-after-disaster-facts-figures-spotlight.html


The different phases of emergency shelter and post-war reconstruction

Humanitarian aid organisations often ship in shelters for people affected by crises, explains Sultan Barakat, founding director of the Post-War Reconstruction Unit at the University of York, United Kingdom, in this audio interview with Imogen Mathers. But this overlooks the vast benefits that can be found by tapping into local resources, materials and building industries. Barakat draws on his experience in the Middle East to illustrate how the humanitarian shelter sector can integrate more harmoniously with local economies and aspirations. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/feature/shelter-after-disaster-facts-figures-spotlight.html

How emergency and post-disaster housing can tap into local resources

During emergencies, it’s crucial to bridge the gap between what local people might want in terms of shelter and what humanitarian organisations can provide, explains Sultan Barakat, founding director of the Post-War Reconstruction Unit at the University of York, United Kingdom, in this audio interview with Imogen Mathers. But doing so takes time, tenacity and cultural sensitivity — ingredients often missing in war zones. Barakat gives examples of pragmatic new approaches — including phased grants and structural inspections — that have generated better housing while creating jobs. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/disasters/feature/shelter-after-disaster-facts-figures-spotlight.html

New approaches to building shelters sensitive to local cultures

In this interview, conducted on the sidelines of the UN’s COP21 summit, Mary Robinson explores the challenges to getting climate migrants recognised as refugees.

Fate of ‘climate refugees’ uncertain

Whatever shape the next Syrian government takes, those who take the reins will face an epic rehabilitation and reconstruction project. 

Around a quarter of a million people have been killed and half the country’s population displaced. Conflict and blockade mean studies on infrastructure damage are scarce. But the satellite imagery and data that is available reveals a devastating picture: the UN estimates that half the country’s hospitals, over 7,000 schools and 2.1 million homes have been destroyed. It will be years before we know the extent of health and environmental effects caused by the destruction of ordinary buildings — through exposure to asbestos, for example — or the bombing of industrial plants. 

In this audio interview, Sultan Barakat, director of the post-war reconstruction and development unit at the University of York, United Kingdom, outlines his ideas for rebuilding Syria. He discusses some of the complex challenges the country will face, from dealing with environmental contamination and land mine clearance to rebuilding homes and getting basic public services up and running. 

Barakat also explains how the nature of warfare and urbanisation in the 21st century complicates post-war reconstruction: bombing is devastating in cities, where infrastructure is tightly interconnected. “If you hit a water purification unit or, as happened in Lebanon and Gaza many times, you hit a power station, you bring the whole city to a halt,” Barakat says. For example, when Israel bombed the Gaza Strip’s only power plant in July 2014, the loss of power affected drinking water pumps and sewage processing, and forced hospitals to rely on precarious generators. 

In Syria, as in Gaza, reconstruction will take billions of dollars, a “coherent” vision for development, technological ingenuity and “a spectrum of strategies”, he says. 


Rising from the rubble: A vision to rebuild Syria

Leonardo da Vinci, the original ‘Renaissance man’, tends to be better known for his drawings of human anatomy and the animal kingdom than buildings. But his architectural designs were no less pioneering in their fusing of imagination and practical ingenuity. Now, almost 500 years after da Vinci’s death, a ‘reciprocal’ floor design — a self-supporting arrangement involving three or more poles overlapping in turn — could transform shelters for people affected by disasters.

In this audio interview, we speak to Shaun Halbert, director of charity ReciproBoo about the use of da Vinci’s reciprocal frames in humanitarian response. “Essentially what we’re doing is taking what Leonardo da Vinci did … and asking the question: ‘Well, if it’s strong enough for a floor, why not use it for a roof?’” Halbert says. The result is a strong roof that can support the tarpaulins that people displaced by emergencies are given in the days immediately following disasters — replacing the weak structures people have tended to fashion in the past from whatever materials are to hand. 
 
The frames are made from either steel or, where possible, locally sourced bamboo, a sustainable wood that grows in the tropical belt where many natural disasters strike. When lashed together, the tensile strength of the bamboo and the engineering ingenuity of the design create a structure that is far more durable and weather resilient than those erected by refugees themselves. And, as well as shelters, the structures can be easily extended to create schools and clinics — resources in high demand but short supply during emergencies. The ReciproBoo shelter won an award at the 2015 Aid Innovation Challenge. 



Leonardo da Vinci inspires emergency shelter design

What are the language barriers facing refugees and what tools can help bridge these linguistic gaps? Rebecca Petras of Translators Without Borders talks to Imogen Mathers. 

Bridging the language gap in the European refugee crisis

In the face of an earthquake or cyclone, what would you do first? Most people, I imagine, would rush to a place of safety, find out what was going on, and make contact with their families. But what if you didn’t know the language of those around you or understand emergency bulletins broadcast or appearing on billboards, television or mobile screens?   

This is what happens to many of the world’s 60 million people displaced living in countries prone to environmental disasters or conflict,  as well as for local people who do not speak the language of government and public broadcasts. 
When crises strike, it’s not just the emergency itself that affects people: actually understanding what is going on and where to get help is a challenge. 

The breakdown in communication between aid workers and affected people following the Haiti earthquake of 2010 prompted the global translation NGO Translators Without Borders to form their ‘Words of Relief’ crisis project. The team have spent the past two years analysing the information needs of people in crises, designing tech-based tools to aid communication, and training up internet translation engines to recognise more obscure languages like Nepali, Dari and Pashto. 

Their deputy director, Rebecca Petras, tells us more in this interview. 


Tech tools break down language barriers in emergencies

Global conflicts now often last longer than they did, and they are becoming more complex to understand and address. Some of the worst civil wars, for example in Syria or South Sudan, have now lasted so long that young children born there hardly remember peace. Food shortages can become severe during conflict, and people are much more vulnerable to extreme weather.

But crisis response is getting smarter, and humanitarian workers can now take advantage of planning tools such as satellite imagery. 

Images from space can help aid agencies restore food supplies, decide on how best to distribute funds and predict violence.

But emergency response during war isn’t the only time satellite imagery helps. A truly effective humanitarian response must follow the lives of refugees long after the immediate aftermath of a conflict, says Taner Kodanaz, a director at DigitalGlobe. 
The firm owns and manages an array of satellites that provide accurate imagery of human activities on the ground. It uses these to cooperate with international institutions such as the UN to analyse migration patterns and identify early warning of conflict.

In this interview, Kodanaz explores the many ways satellite technology supports humanitarian response and explains how space imagery is used to achieve aid goals.

http://www.scidev.net/global/aid/multimedia/satellites-humanitarian-work-refugees.html

The power of satellites in humanitarian work

Medics are using underground clinics and surgery guided by satellite link to save lives, says Zaher Sahloul.

Attacks on health workers in Syria have become so frequent that medical relief charities have been forced to build hospitals in bunkers and deep into the side of mountains.  

The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which provides medical relief across Syria and to refugees in neighbouring countries, now has 22 underground clinics in Syria. These care for some of the millions of Syrians living in hard-to-reach parts of the country and the 800,000 living in besieged areas, cut off from medical aid and supplies, electricity, telephone lines and food aid. 

Ingenuity and resourcefulness are core to these clinics, says Zaher Sahloul, SAMS senior advisor, in this interview. For example, with many power plants bombed out, Syrian hospitals must often rely on diesel-fed generators. But in areas under siege, diesel is unavailable so medical clinics have been testing ways of running generators on methane from animal waste. 

Meanwhile, satellite internet and video apps link Syrian doctors, nurses and medical students to medical teams in the United States. “This is the only way we know what is happening and what’s needed,” Sahloul says. “I can look at the patients and talk with the physicians and nurses and [they can] tell me what’s happening and seek advice.” 

Doctors, nurses and medical students are also being trained to treat the effects of chlorine gas, a chemical agent used frequently by the Assad regime. Virtual situation rooms, using apps like WhatsApp and Viber, guide health workers through chemical weapon response, from treatment to decontamination. SAMS also provide training in advanced trauma life support and how to use crisis technology like portable ultrasound kits.  

The care of the wounded and sick has been protected since the very first Geneva Convention of 1864, but the Syrian conflict has seen the rule book torn up, with attacks on healthcare reshaping conflict and humanitarian response. The story behind one SAMS hospital highlights the shocking “new normal” in twenty-first-century warfare.

SAMS wanted to build the hospital in a city in one besieged area, Sahloul tells SciDev.Net. “But people in the city told them: ‘No way are you going to build a hospital inside the city because that means we will be targeted.’” So the organisation moved it away from the city and dug it deep into the heart of a mountain, where the emergency rooms and intensive care units are served by a 24-metre ventilation shaft.  

Overall, SAMS had 72 clinics attacked last year by bombs, missiles and shells. The international relief charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has stopped sharing hospital locations because of attacks. A new report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition documents 122 attacks on health centres in Syria in 2015.

““People no longer react when hospitals are bombed, doctors are killed,” Sahloul said in his keynote speech at the MSF Scientific Days on 20 May. “This should not be allowed. Not only in Syria, but [also] in the rest of the world.”

The interview was recorded during the MSF Scientific Days. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/health/multimedia/cave-hospitals-syria-front-line.html

The cave hospitals of Syria’s front line

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 