For generations the Bamputi Pygmies were nomadic forest-dwellers but in 2004 they too fled the war. Now they live on the outskirts of Goma with little if any support from humanitarian agencies. They have no electricity or running water; straw-covered roofs on makeshift shelters provide poor protection from the frequent rain.
Although maternal deaths have decreased globally by 35% since 1980, maternal deaths in DRC have decreased by only 3% since 1990, the onset of the recent phase of conflict in DRC. Extended conflict has played a significant role in the destruction of a national health-care system already in an advanced state of disrepair, resulting in poor-quality care offered to communities, lack of well-trained health workers and, due to government disinvestment, unmotivated health-care personnel.
Frameworks developed by the UN and the Government of DRC (GoDRC) with international facilitation between DRC and neighbouring countries are achieving a great deal in terms of addressing the issues around return and reintegration despite the highly politicised humanitarian/transition context of North Kivu.
The last of Sudan’s civil wars between the North and the South ended in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The wars have caused the displacement of more than four million people and the death of more than two million Southerners. The CPA mandated both North and South to make unity attractive, while also paving the way for the South to hold a referendum to decide whether to secede. However, there will be numerous challenges during the preparations for the referendum and after any secession.
A study conducted in Jordan in 20091 shows that a lack of information and transparency contributes to a dynamic of despair among the displaced and exacerbates conditions that motivate them to give credence to hearsay in making decisions about their future.
Decades of armed conflict in Colombia have displaced more than three million people, primarily in rural areas – indigenous communities, people of African descent and small farmers. In 2009 the national forum of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, in a sitting following ruling T-025 of 2004 that declared displacement to be an “unconstitutional state of affairs”, declared that the state’s response to the crisis had been neither integrated nor coordinated.
Fourteen years of civil war in Liberia displaced an estimated one-third of the population both internally and as refuges to neighbouring West African countries, Europe and America. Since the war ended in 2003, a large proportion of Liberians have returned home either voluntarily or through assisted repatriations. Women face a myriad of particular challenges in the return process, and their needs are as varied and complex as the reasons for which they migrated in the first place.