Food, fishing and a miracle plant – with these, ACT in Haiti is helping survivors of two hurricanes and a tropical storm get back on their economic feet. In the space of two years, tropical storm Tomas and hurricanes Isaac and Sandy crossed Haiti, a country still in the early stages of recovery from the devastating 2010 earthquake.

The storms left large tracts of damaged property and agricultural land. With 54 lives lost, the death toll from Sandy was the greatest of the three disasters, and it damaged or destroyed nearly 28,000 houses.

The work of a local ACT member with the community in Balan, 18km east of the capital, has been to reduce soil erosion and protect residents against the next violent storms. Work has also focused on agriculture and fish-farming programmes aimed at long-term development, restoring families’ purchasing power.

To improve agricultural techniques, our member has set up a field school teaching technical skills at demonstration plots, which students replicate on their own land.

Another programme reduces the need for women to fell trees to produce charcoal to sell. Instead, female heads of households receive seeds for growing a market garden – eggplant, tomato, pepper, onion, cabbage and other local vegetables – and agricultural tools such as pickaxes, hoes and machetes.

The fruits and vegetables improve the health of families, and excess produce can be sold for cash. Our member fosters links between government departments, local authorities and communities, encouraging them all to work on environmental problems and so lessen the effect of natural disasters.

To this end, they have helped to cultivate 72,000 papaya, cherry and citrus seedlings, which now flourish on beneficiaries’ land. Fish-farming and technical skills have been introduced by our local member to help combat the chronic malnutrition that affects nearly a quarter of children in Balan.

And to improve nutrition even further, thousands of Moringa oleifera seedlings have been planted. This highly valued plant has an impressive range of medicinal uses and is highly nutritious.

Through its achievements, ACT in Haiti has been able to stimulate the local economy by strengthening the livelihoods of more than 3,000 families from Balan, and has contributed to the rehabilitation of the environment.

More than 11,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in Armenia. Most are ethnic Armenians whose families originally fled the 1915-16 Armenian genocide in which more than 1 million Armenians were killed.

One-third of the existing Armenian population already live in poverty and 18 per cent are unemployed. It is a situation that does not bode well for the refugees – almost none are able to find employment and consequently they quickly use up the resources they bring.

ACT response

Following a very successful Rapid Response Fund programme in 2012, an appeal in 2013 raised US$96,096 and was disbursed to an ACT member. The goal of the response was to assist 942 Syrian refugee families in Armenia.

Most of the refugees arrived with little and hoped to return home soon. However, as the conflict has intensified and prolonged, this has not been possible and they have been forced to rely on assistance.

With many refugees living with extended family in the capital Yerevan, in often cramped, overcrowded conditions, the situation is challenging for their hosts too. Our member used a reliable direct transfer system to get food and basic essentials to the refugees through the use of plastic charge cards from a supermarket chain.

The cards can be used by cardholders to buy the items they most need, but do not allow the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes.

The 2007 general elections in Kenya erupted in ethnic violence.

To prevent a repeat in 2013, the ACT Kenya Forum, made up of 13 members, carried out a campaign for peace.

The campaign was planned as a partnership between youth and faith communities. Focusing on the areas of violence from 2007, the campaign reached 15,000 people.

Events, media coverage and a travelling peace caravan encouraged people not only to register as voters but to choose candidates with a vision of development rather than to vote on ethnic lines.

By focusing on issues, the campaign deliberately challenged ethnically polarised narratives of politics and encouraged greater participation of women, both as candidates and voters.

“The campaign encouraged an examination of how young people had been drawn into violence in the past and what the consequences of that approach were,” said Benson Ireri, from the advocacy working group of the ACT Kenya Forum. “People were encouraged to sign a peace charter and become peace ambassadors, and this was signed by religious and political leaders too.”

In 2012, the European Union announced that future agreements with Israel must exclude settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

In 2013, it issued guidelines to exclude settlements’ participation in EU programmes.

These steps were welcomed by several ACT members, who have long advocated for the EU not to participate in Israel’s violations of international law (through Israel’s construction and maintenance of settlements in the oPt).

Israeli settlements take up Palestinian land and water resources and restrict movement: impeding Palestinian access to education, healthcare and employment, as well as restricting the economy – all contributing to poverty.

Shortly before the EU’s decision, a report called Trading Away Peace, signed by a coalition including ACT members, argued that in its trade relations in particular, the EU was undermining its own position on the illegality of settlements.

It revealed that the EU imported about 15 times more from the illegal settlements than from the Palestinians themselves. Advocacy efforts by some ACT members on settlements have focused on EU institutions and governments, and included partnerships with networks of NGOs such as APRODEV.

They continue to advocate for the EU and European governments to move from words to action – asking, among other things, for measures to ensure the correct labelling of settlement products and, further, a ban of imports of settlement products.

In October, only a few months after the flooding in the north of India, Cyclone Phailin hit the eastern Indian states of Orissa and Andrha Pradesh, leaving 1 million people homeless.

The livelihoods of up to 12 million were affected through loss of crops and destroyed or damaged businesses.

ACT members deployed a large and well-prepared response with food, community kitchens, drinkable water and essential non-food items. And following the immediate relief work, efforts turned to early recovery, including provision of shelter and agricultural rehabilitation.

Over the years, our members in the country had placed significant importance on disaster-preparedness work. This included the building of 24 cyclone shelters in Orissa, all of which were fully occupied during the cyclone.

While the last big cyclone to hit the region, in 1999, saw 10,000 lives lost, Cyclone Phailin saw a much-reduced death toll of 27. This is testament to the huge impact that disaster-preparedness work – coupled with an unprecedented evacuation of 900,000 people from high-risk areas – can have in saving lives.

In many other ways, however, Phailin was just as damaging as its predecessor. An ACT member humanitarian team reported that at least 230,000 homes had been destroyed. Roughly 300,000 hectares of standing crops were affected, wiping out the harvests of subsistence farmers and causing extreme hardship for large numbers of people.

Cyclones form by taking energy from warm tropical oceans with temperatures over 26.5˚C. The recorded temperature in the Bay of Bengal, where Cyclone Phailin developed, was 28-29˚C, and monitoring of sea-surface temperature shows an ongoing trend of warming.

While no individual extreme weather event can be attributed to global warming, the frequency of extreme weather events is increasing and the area around the Bay of Bengal is particularly vulnerable, both in India and Bangladesh.

Typhoon Haiyan, considered the world’s deadliest typhoon and one of the most powerful to ever make landfall, tore through the Philippines on the morning of 8 November 2013 with winds of up to 275km an hour.

ACT established a coordination centre in Manila, and initiated a massive combined response that has topped US$10m. Haiyan cut a devastating path across nine provinces, leaving behind millions of tons of debris. More than 16 million people were affected and 4 million displaced. More than half a million houses were destroyed and another 590,000 houses were badly damaged. And the typhoon’s ferocity left schools, clinics and businesses unable to operate. At least 6,245 people were killed by the typhoon, 28,000 were injured and 1,000 people were still missing at the end of 2013. The United Nations humanitarian coordinator launched a Flash Appeal.

ACT registered nine projects, all of which were approved and included in the appeal. The preparedness of the ACT Forum in the Philippines, and its commitment to effective and immediate response, enabled prompt action. To assist the humanitarian effort, a three-person team was deployed to the Philippines from the ACT Rapid Support Team roster.

An ACT Coordination Centre was set up on the premises of an ACT member in Manila. Humanitarian coordinators worked with members already on the ground to start immediate evaluations in the hardest-hit areas of Tacloban and Leyte.

A psychosocial expert began group work with local communities, developing materials in local languages. The Rapid Support Team was complemented by a professional communicator from the ACT secretariat, who documented the devastation and helped develop the communication resources needed for the fundraising campaigns of ACT members across the world.

Recovery is long-term and will depend on restoring the livelihoods of the 5.9 million people estimated to have lost them. Both crops and produce, and the ability to produce them, were wiped out.

At village level, some 30,000 fishermen lost their boats and nets, causing hardship for the coastal communities, who were some of the hardest hit. Rebuilding their livelihoods depends on building new boats, which is a relatively quick process. Many other recovery processes will take longer. Millions of coconut trees were blown down. It takes five to seven years for new coconut trees to bear fruit, so the many families and communities that rely on coconut farming as a substantial part of their livelihoods now need alternative incomes for up to seven years.

It is expected that farmers of crops such as rice and sugar, which can be harvested more quickly, will recover faster. However, the infrastructure to process these crops has also been damaged and in some cases destroyed.

Estimates for the total cost of reconstruction exceed US$5bn, and the complexity of the reconstruction is said to be unparalleled. From the onset of the typhoon, our members in the Philippines gave life-saving support – food and shelter, and water and sanitation – to the most vulnerable and resource-poor people and began planning effective interventions for restoring livelihoods. Psychosocial support was also recognised as crucial for the recovery of communities, and our members have worked on providing it in some of the most traumatised areas.

ACT is active in 17 provinces and 73 municipalities, reaching 208,600 people and an additional 4,433 households. As recovery and rebuilding moves along, everyone is aware that risks from extreme weather are increasing. “We know that Haiyan won’t be the last typhoon,” said Sylwyn Sheen Alba, who is working on the ACT response. “We hadn’t finished recovering from Typhoon Bopha when Haiyan hit. We need to understand this is a pattern and prepare ourselves.”

A large delegation of ACT organisations took part in the UN climate talks in Warsaw where Yeb Saño, chief climate negotiator for the Philippines, made an impassioned speech directly after the typhoon.

Linking extreme climate events such as Haiyan to climate change, he committed to standing with victims of Haiyan, and put pressure on negotiators to “stop the climate madness” by voluntarily fasting. Thousands of people stood in solidarity with Yeb Saño by fasting, including many staff and supporters of ACT Alliance organisations.

Existing chronic food insecurity in Mali was compounded by three years of low rainfall, reducing the availability of food and increasing food prices beyond the reach of the poor. Mali is on the frontline of climate-related emergencies today.

The UN Human Development Index ranks the country at 182 out of 187 countries. In 2013, environmental challenges were aggravated by armed conflict, as rebels and militant Islamists took over the north of the country and imposed a brutal form of Sharia law.

French troops, the African Union and UN peacekeeping forces took back control of the territory, but only after months of violence. The dual destabilising effects of extreme weather and conflict resulted in many people having to leave their homes in search of food and safety. In their search for survival they created new competition for, and conflict over, already scarce resources.

During 2013, the number of internally displaced people rose to more than 350,000, and the number of Malian refugees moving into Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and Algeria rose to more than 180,000.

ACT response

Our members came together to help the displaced people in camps in the south of Mali, those in and around the capital Bamako, and the people who were slowly returning to the north as the violence subsided. We supported people with food, education, health, essential non-food items such as blankets, hygiene kits and mosquito nets, water and sanitation and psychosocial work.

Philippe Bassinga, an ACT member manager for the Sahel crisis, described how ACT had helped people returning to the country: “Returning refugees and displaced persons can access food. It’s on the market,” he said.

“But they don’t have money to buy what’s on the market. So we’ve had to combine our response to the conflict with our response to food insecurity in the Sahel. That means helping people better manage their assets, such as food and livestock, but also providing cash through direct transfer programmes and cash-for-work opportunities.”

The Civil Society Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE) has assessed international policies such as the Millennium Development Goals and concluded that they cannot be met with economic growth as the driver of development.

Instead, it promotes political leadership and commitment to sustainable approaches. However, aid budgets are in decline, and in many parts of the world the voices of civil society are being silenced.

To examine these issues, ACT organised the first Global Consultation of the Faith-Based Development Organisations on Participation in the CPDE. The meeting in Geneva, attended by 20 representatives of global faithbased organisations (FBOs), was a space for reflection on how to strengthen joint work and for prioritising actions.

It was agreed to promote involvement of FBOs in the national CPDE platforms. Over time, the group hopes to include an increasingly broad spectrum of faiths.

The civil war in Syria has been raging for three years, causing a severe humanitarian crisis.

According to the UN, more than 4 million people have been displaced within the country and more than 2 million refugees have found their way to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and countries further afield.

The death toll rose by 20,000 in just the three months from June to September 2013. ACT Alliance members have been providing humanitarian support from the onset of the crisis.

An ACT appeal in 2013 raised US$7.2m, and with it five of our members (working on health, food and essential non-food items, shelter, education and psychosocial work) came together as the ACT Jordan/ Syria/Lebanon Forum to coordinate the humanitarian response. They have been assisting conflict-affected families inside Syria, as well as refugees and host communities in Lebanon and Jordan.

Around 500,000 people in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were beneficiaries of the 12-month appeal, and ACT continues to respond with humanitarian assistance.

The magnitude and complexity of the crisis, and the scale of the ACT humanitarian response, required an external evaluation of the appeal, which was carried out in late 2013. The evaluation commended the work members have done to provide an essential lifeline to the people affected by the conflict.

ACT continued to work in the Za’atari refugee camp, just south of the Syrian border in Jordan, where the population expanded from 60,000 in January to 120,000 in July. Our members helped prepare refugees for the winter through rehabilitation of dwellings and heating, and the distribution of winter clothes. Syrians had arrived unprepared for the harsh 2013 winter, which brought historic snowfall, reportedly the heaviest for 140 years.

Other programmes have included education, livelihoods, public health and shelter. Because so many refugees have emerged from deeply traumatic experiences and face conditions that tend to lead to conflict, our members have also put in place community-based psychosocial support, peace-building and conflict-mitigation programmes.

2013 saw many calls from foreign governments for military intervention. We called for a peaceful solution, urging all parties to adhere to international humanitarian law, protect civilians and to negotiate an end to the conflict.

When Aline was first diagnosed with HIV, she was ashamed and frightened. Now she provides support and advice to others and takes part in a radio show for people living with HIV that encourages people to talk openly about the virus.

Radio Ivyizigiro means Radio Hope – and hope is exactly what it provided for Aline when she was first diagnosed with HIV.

‘I was feeling weak but the programme gave me lots of information, which increased my knowledge and made me stronger,’ said the mother of three.

‘I heard that I was not the only one to have it; it was important to have that testimony. When you listen a lot, you lose your worries.’

Banishing stigma

Radio Ivyizigiro is run by ACT member Christian Aid’s partner, the World Outreach Initiative (WOI).

It broacasts HIV information, including advice on how to care for people with the condition, as well as information about counselling and advocacy programmes.

The radio station has the fourth highest listener figures in Burundi, reaching between 5 million and 7 million people.

‘Before the programme there was lots of stigma,’ Aline recalls. ‘People would point their finger but that has been reduced.

‘Now we have found a voice and we can talk openly. People call in live and we reply with advice.

‘I think this programme is very good – it helps HIV-positive people to understand that hiding is not the solution and that it can be normal to live with HIV.’

Support for HIV-positive people

WOI is part of the HUMURA Consortium, which brings together four religious partners working on HIV.

They implement health and HIV programmes, and conduct advocacy and lobbying for the rights of HIV positive people.

WOI also organises HIV tests and provides support for HIV-positive people, such as helping them set up small businesses.

In addition, WOI runs clinics and health centres supplying basic medicines and lab materials not provided by the Government of Burundi.

They also organise debates in schools and places frequented by young people.

The power of radio

‘The impact of speaking on the radio is very strong,’ explains Patrick Dushime of WOI. ‘Someone many kilometres away from Bujumbura, who can’t talk about it in church or take part in a meeting, can still hear.

‘People can listen in a secret way if they need to. Almost everyone has radios or phones, even the very poor.’

When they reported on a shortage of lab materials needed for HIV testing, the government put in place a commission to oversee supplies and there are now fewer shortages.

On another occasion, a Pentecostal leader featured on the programme said AIDS was a punishment. ‘But he’s now changed his mind, to the extent that he takes part in our counselling programmes,’ says Dushime.

For Aline, the key to overcoming stigma and spreading a message of hope is to keep talking: ‘There is a Burundian proverb that says, “If you want to cure an illness, you have to talk about it.”

‘If one day there is a cure, we will be the first to have it because our situation is known.’