Meeting basic needs in the most isolated corner of Africa

A whole day travelling: that’s the time in which a plane takes its passengers from one side of the world to the other, or how long it takes a family going on holiday in their car to cross a mid-sized country or a large American state. Even a cyclist can easily cover more than 100km (60 miles) in a day.

A truck carefully moves off a rudimentary ferry on the road
north of Bria, north-east CAR.

But in the remote north-east of the Central African Republic, the few Sudanese truckers who try to get their much-needed supplies through to these isolated towns and villages are lucky if they manage to cover 60km (36 miles) in that same day. And that’s during the dry season, when the sand has not turned to sludge and the countless streams are dry and easily forded. When it’s wet, the trucks simply disappear into the morass and wait, totally immobilised for months. There are no bridges – in fact, there is nothing that anyone could really describe as a road, whatever the optimistic twenty-year-old map might indicate. Just a narrow dirt or sand track fast disappearing in the undergrowth, winding its way northwards through the scrub forests for hundreds of kilometres.

The road south of Ouadda.

There are no other routes. This region is as far from the sea as it is possible to get in Africa – 1,600km (1,000 miles) as the crow flies – and in the dry savannah the rivers are far too small for cargo boats. The government has neither the means nor the capacity to govern here; they can provide no security, support or supplies, and have hardly done so for decades. The people who eke out an existence here have no other choice but to be totally self-sufficient, their only connection with the outside world those trucks that manage to get through a few times a year. The truckers, in addition to having to dig themselves out of the sand a few times a day, take the risk of being attacked and robbed by armed bandits who take advantage of the area’s remoteness. Last week, they struck six times within as many days along the only practicable road that leads from Bangui, the Central African Republic’s capital, to the north-eastern Vakaga region. With difficulties this big and the tiny profits available from the impoverished population, many truckers are giving up and no longer return.

It’s not just food, basic household items such as tarpaulins or buckets, or clothes that no longer get through as a result – there are no medical supplies, no books or pens for the few rudimentary bush schools; no visitors to which to sell anything, no news from relatives. In our increasingly connected world, this isolation is more extreme, the local people more inaccessible and forgotten, than researchers at the south pole or astronauts in space.

A UN assessment mission stops in a larger village
north of Bria.

In the midst of this poverty, humanitarian crises can develop in the blink of an eye. People live in simple mud huts, often without access to clean water. Poachers and bandits prey on the population, targeting any sign of wealth (even a few cattle). Malnutrition is already ubiquitous, and one bad harvest – not enough rain, or too much too fast causing floods which ruin entire crops – can trigger a major famine. Disaffected locals abandoned by everyone start insurgent attacks, leading to a deteriorating cycle of violence and reprisals where human rights are routinely ignored. Life here is at its most basic, difficult and short.

The IMC healthpost in Seregobo, south of Birao.

There are a few glimmers of change. A few hardy NGOs have set up in the area, including the American medical relief agency IMC which has set up offices in the larger towns, rehabilitating health posts, training and paying for their staff, providing therapeutic feeding centres to reduce infant malnutrition, and educating the local population on the biggest health threats (malaria, diarrhoea and of course AIDS). The UN, which works closely with the NGOs providing financing and coordination support, recently carried out an inter-agency evaluation mission – although even their fully-equipped all-terrain Landcruisers needed three days to get from Bria to Birao, carrying five extra drums of fuel and several spare tires for each vehicle, and winching their vehicles through the mud and the sand. ACTED, an NGO specialising in improving access to the most isolated, has started building bridges to make the most impassable stretches of track feasible – maybe even during the six-month-long rainy season. And the most urgent life-saving supplies and equipment are now being brought in by plane.

The UNHAS plane lands at the airstrip in Sam-Ouandja,
near the border with Sudan.

It is impossible to overstate the importance to this remote region of the UN’s humanitarian air service, UNHAS. Since last year, its rugged twin turbo-prop capable of transporting 19 passengers or 1,900 kg (4,200 pounds) of cargo, and which can land on tiny rough patches of open land serving as basic airstrips (once the people and goats have been scared off it by a mandatory fly-past), has been flying here once or twice every week from Bangui, the capital. For now, it remains the only feasible option of getting anything to these forgotten people, without which the NGOs struggle to set up even basic programmes.

Helping to drag the population out of their mire of poverty and crisis in this country, as abandoned by its own weak and incapable government as it has already been for decades by the international community, is an enormous challenge. However basic the needs of the population and of the NGOs trying to reach them, funding remains tight. NGOs struggle to convince their backers that a funding decline before the local institutions and state bodies are capable of continuing their work will plunge the people straight back into the hopelessness of disease and violence. And the UN searches desperately for partners to help it keep the plane in the air for another month. The second plane was cancelled last year, and user prices (normally subsidised so that NGOs can afford to use it) have already doubled – but it costs $250,000 a month to keep the plane flying and money is scarce for what many who control the shrinking donor budgets often assume is merely an expensive luxury.

Unloading essential supplies in Sam-Ouandja

But this is the forgotten, isolated heart of Africa. There are no roads. There are no alternatives. Even well-travelled people with years of experience working in Africa are astonished by the extremes of life here. There are individuals and agencies who are beginning to reach out to these desperate people, but without the commitment and long-term backing of their Western donors, the hope will fade. They will be abandoned once more, unnoticed and unlamented until the next crisis hits – as inevitable as it would have been avoidable had we but stayed.

More information

• UNHAS, the UN Humanitarian Air Service
• Press release on UNHAS funding shortages
• IMC: Read more on their activities in CAR here and here
• ACTED: See a list of their projects in CAR here

The views expressed in this article are those of the author only, and do not necessarily represent the view of, and should not be attributed to, any UN agency or NGO.
All photos Nick Imboden/HDPT/2008-9.