Projects

Short Description:

Overall goal

In the first weeks of 2012, an armed rebellion led by the Mouvement National de Liberation de l’Azawad (MNLA) and other armed groups broke out in northern Mali. By early February, the fighting had escalated to a non-international armed conflict, placing considerable pressure on President Touré in Bamako. On 22 March, the tensions in the capital culminated in a coup d’état staged by officers from the armed forces.

The conflict and fighting in Northern Mali has triggered large-scale population movements within Mali, with many IDPs arriving in the urban centres in the North, in the Mopti area, near the country’s north/south divide, and into neighbouring countries. Health and education services in the north of Mali have been disrupted, while looting in the main cities further reduced poor harvest stocks, which had already compromised the food security of thousands of families in northern Mali as well as parts of Niger hard hit by previous and ongoing food crises.

The Mali Red Cross, the Red Cross Society of Niger and the ICRC have organized their humanitarian response together, scaling up and adapting their services to the changed situation.

As essential services have been disrupted, the ICRC, with the Mali Red Cross, is helping secure the

population’s access to water and medical treatment.

• It supplies fuel and transports spare parts to power plants to allow water to be treated and supplied to 60,000 residents of Gao, Kidal and Tombouctou,while planning to gradually turn over responsibility to the water authorities.

• The ICRC provides its own staff and finances others working in the Gao hospital and the Ansongo referral health centre and supplies both of these facilities, along with 9 other health centres, with medical and/or surgical material.

The ICRC also intends to provide 420,000 particularly vulnerable people with two rations of food to help tide them over until the next harvest.