---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "IRIN" <[email protected]> Date: 9 Feb 2016 04:55 Subject: Your daily selection of IRIN Africa English reports, 2/9/2016 To: "Elisabeth Janaina" <[email protected]> Cc:
[image: IRINnews logo] <http://www.irinnews.org/> humanitarian news and analysis Table of contents 1. When shit happens <#-1504036256_1> 2. Turkey’s refugee smugglers adapt and prosper <#-1504036256_2> ------------------------------ *When shit happens <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=102414>* [image: lead photo]NEW YORK, 8 February 2016 (IRIN) - Everyone defecates, but ‘how’ and ‘where’ are questions that highlight class, gender and cultural differences between us. While Westernised habits of wiping with toilet paper provoke disgust in some, the idea of using a hand and water appalls others. Among the Masai in Kenya, tradition has it that men don’t defecate; for some communities in South India, crapping outdoors is an age-old social event; while for many women and girls, “going” outside can be downright dangerous. Sanitation remains an issue before, during and after humanitarian emergencies. For those working to end open defecation, practiced by over two billion people, there is a taboo-laden <http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/sites/communityledtotalsanitation.org/files/Dynamics_and_Sustainability.pdf)> bog of issues to wade through. IRIN explores some of them. *The benefits* The “sanitation revolution” in Europe in the 1840s recognised the need to separate waste and water – and has been pursued ever since with evangelical zeal. The health benefits of reform are clear. According to the World Health Organization, 842,000 people die from inadequate water and sanitation access every year, with 280,000 deaths from diarrhoea directly linked to poor sanitation. Diseases like cholera and typhoid, intestinal worms, malnutrition and stunting are other consequences. Work and school days missed due to ill health are just some of the hidden costs of having no place to “go”. For every $1 invested in sanitation, around $5.50 will be saved in health and productivity costs, estimates the WHO <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs392/en/>. *How far do we have to go? * Although steady progress has been made in recent years, around 2.4 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation and handwashing facilities. For far too long, sanitation has been a “silent taboo” says water and sanitation expert Lyla Mehta of the UK's Institute of Development Studies. Sanitation only made it onto the global health agenda when it was incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals in 2002. (It’s now Sustainable Development Goal 6 – clean water and sanitation for all). The biggest challenges lie in sub-Saharan Africa, where less than half the people in 47 countries have toilets or latrines, and in India, where 600 million people still defecate in the open. What complicates delivery is the steady stream of people into cities and urban settlements. *How do we measure success? * Not by counting the number of toilets rolled out by government, NGO or community-led programmes, says Mehta, co-editor of the study Shit Matters <http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/shit-matters-the-potential-of-community-led-total-sanitation>. “The global attention for sanitation is great, but it’s still very target driven, focusing on stopping open defecation and delivering toilets. Really it should be about equity and inclusion [the extent to which the most marginalised in a community are reached] rather than counting toilets.” The danger in focusing on toilet delivery is you can lose sight of the ultimate goal – improved health. Providing a community with toilets does not necessarily mean that community will use or maintain them. Toilets and latrines are all too often abandoned, ignored or improperly managed. Half-baked solutions resulting in overflowing latrines, coverless fly magnets or contaminated water tables, or portable toilets housed inside shacks, often pose greater health hazards than no intervention at all. The ‘toilet wars’ in the Cape Town township of Kayelitsha, South Africa, in 2013 were testament to this. Communities revolted against inadequate sanitation, including portable toilets that were an insanitary excuse for the real thing, and faeces was thrown in protest <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-22853095> at government officials. *What is the most effective strategy – top-down or bottom-up? * There is no one-size-fits-all strategy – or toilet type, for that matter – say the experts. Most point to the need for a mix of state, NGO-led and community approaches that line up with cultural norms. Certainly top-down strategies that dump toilets on communities in the hope that they will then use, maintain and pay for them has often failed, says Preetha Prabhakaran, programme manager for Africa and Asia for the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Foundation. Patronising approaches that rely on “experts” who impose the need for sanitation on a community won’t work if the community does not feel that need, she says. This realisation has led to the hugely popular CLTS approach, pioneered by foundation chairman Kamel Kar <http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/page/kamal-kar>. *What is CLTS?* The premise of CLTS is that unless the community itself drives and owns the process – which is first and foremost about changing behavior – it won’t be sustainable. CLTS advocates try to motivate collective behaviour change by making people aware of the link between their faeces and disease and then triggering shame and disgust towards the health risks of open defecation, so that the community gets inspired to come up with its own solutions. In realising that everyone needs sanitation for the health of all, the whole community then comes on board, says Prabhakaran. “The focus in a collective approach is not on acquiring a toilet but on adopting sanitation and hygiene behaviours, one of the outputs of which is a toilet,” she adds. *Can this lead to stigma and discrimination?* While CLTS, now used in many countries, has proved very effective and sustainable, particularly in rural areas, and is being lauded for being driven by the communities themselves, some observers are ringing alarm bells. They argue that it can be dangerous if the common good tramples on the rights of some individuals – the poorest people in a community unable to keep up with new sanitation and hygiene norms, or women who are often expected to be more hygienic than men, for example. Mehta agrees that CLTS works best in homogenous communities, not those riven by caste or ethnic divisions, where some less powerful groups may end up being the losers in a programme that the community drives itself. Prabhakaran says shaming people is not a part of CLTS. However, she adds: “When people realise that due to open defecation they are eating each other’s shit, they themselves feel shame, disgust and other emotions. It is this trigger – that they feel themselves – that gets them to stop.” Strategies to induce behavioural change, that often involve children, can include blowing a whistle when someone goes outdoors, putting flags on faeces with people’s names on them, even presenting ‘culprits’ with their own faeces, according to a paper on the subject. The authors site instances in Bangladesh where individuals have been stoned for defecating outside, coerced into signing contracts to build latrines and locked out of their homes for not doing so, among other punishments. They argue for more scrutiny of how CLTS programs are playing out. “Social inequality is very resilient and crops up in different ways,” says anthropologist Amber Wutich <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23165706>, director of the Centre for Global Health at Arizona State University. Sanitation is “a very complex problem because it deals with issues that are connected to strong felt human emotions of disgust. We need a diversity of solutions to be tested. There isn’t a one-size solution that fits all.” pg/oa/ag Access report online <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=102414> ------------------------------ *Turkey’s refugee smugglers adapt and prosper <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=102415>* [image: lead photo]ISTANBUL, 8 February 2016 (IRIN) - In the main square of Aksaray, a neighbourhood in Istanbul densely populated by refugees, Haroun Yamani tries to placate potential clients who are seeking a future in Europe but are anxious about the treacherous boat journey that will take them there. The slight, chain-smoking refugee recruiter claims that unlike other smugglers who have been known to run away with payments, he is “a good man” who charges the steep price of $1,300 per person because “there are dangerous ways, and there are safer ones, which must be more expensive.” The reality for would-be passengers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflict ridden and economically deprived countries is that they could well be paying for their own death. On Monday, as visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for “swift results” in Turkey’s crackdown on the smugglers and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, in turn, appealed for greater NATO involvement, winter winds whipped up the Aegean, turning over two boats and claiming at least 33 more lives. Following its recent and controversial deal with the European Union, Turkey has certainly beefed up its anti-smuggling campaign. Yamani’s operation has encountered additional police presence along the road from Istanbul and along the coast, but he assures clients that he has contacts on the inside, “who will inform us” of any need to circumvent checkpoints or pay bribes to security officials. *See: Turkey introduces tough new border policies for Syrians <http://www.irinnews.org/report/101007/turkey-introduces-tough-new-border-policies-for-syrians)>* Yamani says the price is about half that demanded during summer months, when the waters are calmer and the likelihood of boat accidents and hypothermia are reduced. But he adds that the winter trips are “comfortable, not dangerous, God willing.” If he knows it, he doesn’t mention that since the beginning of 2016, more than 360 people have died or gone missing trying to cross the Aegean, according to the International Organization for Migration. This was up from 82 recorded deaths during the same month last year. *EU deal brings new measures* Some 2.5 million Syrian refugees have crossed into Turkey since the war in Syria began, making it the largest host of Syrians in the world. The country is under increasing pressure from the EU to stem the flow of refugees and migrants who have departed from its shores in their hundreds of thousands to reach nearby Greek islands like Lesvos. In a bid to fulfill its part of the $3.2-billion aid deal signed with the EU in November, Turkey has made efforts to tighten its borders, crack down on smuggling networks, and improve living conditions for Syrian refugees, in part by issuing work permits to those residents in the country for six months or more. <http:///Photo/Details/201602081513230022/Refugees-continue-to-make-their-way-to-the-Turkish-smuggling-hub-of-Izmir-despite-the-EU-deal> Photo: Nicola Zolin/IRIN <http://www.irinnews.org/photo> Refugees continue to make their way to the Turkish smuggling hub of Izmir despite the EU deal On 1 February, government spokesman Numan Kurtulmus told a cabinet meeting that Turkey has “decided to categorise smuggling as a terror crime, an organized crime, and enact legal amendments to that extent, including confiscation of assets used in smuggling.” He added that a special police task force to prevent smuggling is in the works, and that a decree has been signed in order to strengthen coordination between the police, the coastguard, local governments, and other relevant institutions. Such measures have made the headlines in Turkey, most recently on 6 February, when Turkish police raided three factories producing unlicensed and substandard inflatable boats used to smuggle migrants to Greece. In recent weeks, Turkey has also deployed additional gendarmerie troops along its Aegean coast. * Smugglers adapt fast* But frequent beach sweeps in and around coastal cities are insufficient to catch all the groups. Smugglers have adapted by operating more furtively. They constantly change the hotels or locations in the woods where refugees linger before their departure, and simply wait for the coast to be clear – often in early morning – before giving the green light for the boarding of the boats. Since the early 2000s, the Turkish government has appeared almost powerless to prevent people smuggling from ballooning into the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today. *See: Refugees defy EU-funded crackdown in Turkey <http://newirin.irinnews.org/refugees-defy-eu-funded-crackdown-in-turkey/>* Fulya Memisoglu, an assistant professor at Cukurova University who studies smuggling and trafficking networks in Turkey, said the transnational nature of the business presents a significant challenge. People smuggling involves “different countries and perpetrators who very easily adjust to the changing dynamics of migration flows,” she told IRIN. * Secretive kingpins* According to the refugees, the facilitators are often of Syrian origin and present a “neat and clean” image upon which they build trust, Memisoglu said. But these characters are the just the presentable face of a broader network whose hidden leaders are hard to identify and who are cunning enough to constantly replace their underlings. The facilitators are sometimes “saving money themselves to be smuggled through migrant smuggling, so they may no longer be in Turkey after a few weeks, or a few months,” explained Memisoglu. Despite the icy waters and government pressures, demand for passage to Europe has only increased since last year, and the numbers of those arriving on European shores, as well as the death tolls, are only expected to continue rising. *The rise of social media* Unlike last year, when smugglers recruited out in the open in neighbourhoods popular with refugees, Yamani says most are now shifting recruitment off the streets and further into the depths of social media, amping up their advertising campaigns on an unknown number of groups on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Viber. As well as boats, they advertise forged documents that can make registration easier once people get to Greece. Prices range from $50 for marriage certificates to $1,250 for passports. A Facebook spokesperson said smuggling groups violate its community standards and are removed once the company is notified of their existence. However, it is impossible to keep up with the rapid pace of new and constantly changing groups conducted in languages that are often not understood by overseers in European or American offices. “Facebook is very quick to take down pages that are working to smuggle people, but the trouble is that we’re seeing an extension of sketchy, well-disguised travel agents, exploiting the needs and the huge imperative for desperate people, who are of course using social media – Facebook, Google hangouts, you name it, whatever works,” IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle told IRIN. <http:///Photo/Details/201602081517240941/A-Syrian-refugee-buys-lifejackets-in-the-streets-of-Basmane> Photo: Nicola Zolin/IRIN <http://www.irinnews.org/photo> A Syrian refugee buys lifejackets in the streets of Basmane In groups such as the “Smugglers Market,” “Smugglers to Europe,” or “Trips from Turkey to Greece” catering to Syrians in Turkey and elsewhere, competitive winter rates have reached new lows, with smugglers charging as little as $500 per trip. The prices have experts concerned that smugglers are taking even more shortcuts than before, sending refugees in lower quality boats and with more counterfeit, non-buoyant life vests that serve little purpose for the many refugees unable to swim. *Worth the risk* Ismael, a refugee from Homs, who requested his last name not be used due to security concerns, is in the middle of a 12-hour shift selling one-Turkish-lira (30 cents) tea to provide for his wife and three children. Informal salaries like his are not enough, and he dips into his savings to cover soaring rent and food prices. He sees private minibuses full of refugees departing daily, even during snowstorms, from his neighbourhood of Aksaray, and says his countrymen have “seen so much war and destruction, it’s worth it to take one more risk in order to get to a better place.” While refugees risk the boat journey to Greece to escape the “exploitation” that is rampant in Turkish cities like Istanbul, “the smugglers live very happily,” Ismael says. “They can make $20,000 per month during a busy month. They have everything: a home, cars, all the possibilities – whereas the rest of us have little.” Young men like 29-year-old Mohamad Moussa say they can’t wait any longer to start their lives. “When I came to Turkey, I received nothing in terms of human rights,” said Moussa, who paid smugglers $600 to ferry him across the sea to Greece last month, and is now continuing onwards with the goal of reaching Germany. The journey from Turkey’s coastal city of Izmir to the Greek island of Lesvos was cold and Moussa “felt the waves,” but he couldn’t wait for the arrival of spring, when prices would be out of reach. “In Turkey, any place I worked, anything I did, I felt lost,” he said. “At least in Europe, I will have rights and I will have the chance to make some money to send back to my family still living in Syria.” sr/ag Access report online <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=102415> ------------------------------ About IRIN <http://www.irinnews.org/about.aspx> | Jobs <http://www.irinnews.org/jobs.aspx> | Revise/unsubscribe <http://www.irinnews.org/registration/login.aspx> Copyright © IRIN 2015. All rights reserved. [image: Facebook] <https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/facebook/offer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> [image: Twitter] <https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/twitter/offer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> [image: Google+] <https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/google_plusone_share/offer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> [image: LinkedIn] <https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/linkedin/offer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> [image: Pinterest] <https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/pinterest/offer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> [image: Addthis] <https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?source=tbx32nj-1.0&v=300&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irinnews.org&pubid=ra-5165551068a72215&ct=1&title=IRIN%20-%20%20the%20inside%20story%20on%20emergencies&pco=tbxnj-1.0> -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/southsudankob View this message at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/southsudankob/topic-id/message-id For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "South Sudan Info - The Kob" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/SouthSudanKob. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/SouthSudanKob/CAJb14oouj6vuteoF2whcSOkCQJpCAO%3DjNdPS%2BGw3Wq3uhioBBA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.Title: Untitled Page Parameter is not valid.
at System.Drawing.Bitmap..ctor(String filename, Boolean useIcm) at Photo_Download.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in c:\inetpub\newsite\photo\Download.aspx.cs:line 88
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/southsudankob
View this message at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/southsudankob/topic-id/message-id
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "South Sudan Info - The Kob" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/SouthSudanKob.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/SouthSudanKob/CAJb14oouj6vuteoF2whcSOkCQJpCAO%3DjNdPS%2BGw3Wq3uhioBBA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Title: Untitled Page Parameter is not valid.
at System.Drawing.Bitmap..ctor(String filename, Boolean useIcm) at Photo_Download.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in c:\inetpub\newsite\photo\Download.aspx.cs:line 88
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/southsudankob
View this message at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/southsudankob/topic-id/message-id
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "South Sudan Info - The Kob" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/SouthSudanKob.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/SouthSudanKob/CAJb14oouj6vuteoF2whcSOkCQJpCAO%3DjNdPS%2BGw3Wq3uhioBBA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
