The eyes of the world are currently focused on the people of Ukraine. Every day, media around the world report in detail about the lives of the war victims without electricity, heating or running water, about their escape from bombed cities and about the fights of the Ukrainian armed forces against the Russian attackers. But even beyond the war in Eastern Europe there are enormous emergencies, some of which have been going on for a very long time – which, however, hardly get any attention.
To change that, the aid organization Care compiles a list of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes that have been neglected by the media once a year. She has now published her seventh report under the title. Accordingly, the ten most pronounced crises, which hardly made headlines in the past year, are all in Africa.
Angola tops the care list
At the top of the list is Angola. The southwest African country is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years, Care reports. Almost four million people are suffering from hunger and more than 100,000 children under the age of five are malnourished. Despite these frightening figures, only 1,847 online articles on the humanitarian crisis in Angola appeared last year. On the other hand, there were 2.2 million online articles on Ukraine. This makes the war in Ukraine the most reported crisis by far in 2022.
According to Care, for its report, more than 5.8 million online articles in Arabic, German, English, French and Spanish were analyzed by the international media monitoring service Meltwater between January 1 and October 10, 2022. From a list of 47 humanitarian crises that affect at least one million people, the ten crises with the lowest media coverage were identified.
“In the past year, the old rule came true again: the less physical distance there is between us and a crisis and the better we can identify with the people affected, the more attention we pay to the events”, says Karl-Otto Zentel, General Secretary of Care Germany. In 2021, the humanitarian situation in Ukraine ranked second among the crises that received the least attention. “Then, in February, when the war spread to the whole country and thus moved closer to us, the situation changed very quickly.”
The fact that only African countries appear on the Care list shows how great the distance many reporters seem to have from the African continent. The United Nations recently warned that parts of Africa are threatened by an historic hunger crisis, said Claudine Awute, Care’s vice president for international programs. “We experience the extent of this every day in our work. Parents skip meals to keep their children from starving. Fields dry up, livestock die. Families flee because they cannot find food or water.” In view of this dramatic situation, it is all the more worrying that the plight of the people is hardly reported, warns Awute. “If we continue to look the other way, the consequences will be catastrophic.”
In addition to armed conflicts, the background to the emergencies around the world is now mostly climate change. Also those from Care in “Breaking the Silence” The countries mentioned are suffering from the consequences of global warming. In the photo gallery above you will find the ten humanitarian crises that hardly made the headlines in 2022.
Sources: Welthungerhilfe, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Unicef
Source: Stern
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