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REPORTS REACHING our news desk from all parts of West, East and Central Africa indicate that as a result of severe rains over the past week unprecedented floods are sweeping across these areas.
As at the time of going to press some 1.5 million people had been affected by the floods. Certified deaths directly attributed to the floods include: 32 in Ghana, 41 in Nigeria, 33 in Burkina Faso,20 in Togo ,12 in Niger ,4 in Somalia ,4 in Morocco , 2 in Mauritania, 64 in Sudan ,21 in Uganda ,18 in Rwanda ,12 in Kenya ,17 in Ethiopia.
The United Nations together with the governments of these 17 countries affected are working hard to provide clean water, food, clothing and shelter to the thousands of displaced people. In East Africa, the brunt of the torrential rain was felt in Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan. In eastern Uganda over150,000 have been made homeless since August.
Another 400,000 - mainly subsistence farmers - have lost their livelihoods after their fields were flooded and roads washed. On the other side of the continent, Ghana in West Africa has also been heavily hit.
Three regions in the north have been declared an official disaster zone after whole towns and villages were submerged. The airlifting of food and medical supplies to affected areas is expected to start on Monday or Tuesday. The UN has diverted a helicopter from Darfur in Sudan to help with the effort.
MORE RAINS COMING
As this natural disaster is battled meteorologists have warned that more rains are coming and more severe flooding and more misery is predicted across West to Eastern Africa. The World Food Programme has urged governments to do all they can to help provide immediate relief.
WFP has launched an $60m appeal for food aid to Uganda alone, where it estimates 1.7 m people will go hungry.
North-eastern Uganda has lost most of its crops to flooding, after the heaviest rains in three decades. "We anticipate that the situation will worsen," said Elizabeth Byrs from the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), with a flood zone already stretching "from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea."
In Ethiopia, more than 4,000 people are stranded in the eastern Afar region after a dam collapsed. With many of the farm crops and stored food of these countries washed away by the floods and more rains expected, the fear of a looming famine is almost a certainty. As many environmentalist have warned, unfortunately the effects of global warming will be felt by low across Africa with the other
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