In the last few months, almost 130,000 people have fled the Central African Republic. The exhausted new arrivals survive in very fragile conditions. Our emergency team has been deployed to Cameroon to provide essential aid to several thousands of these refugees.
Thousands of refugees to cross the border from the CAR by December 2014
“We’re seeing people who are extremely weak, dehydrated, and malnourished. They need immediate help,” explains Sandra Lamarque, head of our emergency team, from Gado Badzere. “What’s more, the camps are overflowing. For example, the camp that I’m in now was designed to hold 8,000 people. More than 15,000 people live here now. So they only have 10 liters of water per day, and share one toilet between 100 people. There are fewer refugees coming from the CAR than there were in April. It used to be thousands every week, and there were only a few hundred in September. But that is still a considerable number of people.”
SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL carries out a lot of its work in a new refugee camp, Gado 2, built to ease the pressure on Gado camp. Andrea Angioletti, our emergency team’s advisor on water, hygiene and sanitation, tells us more: “In this camp, the sanitation situation is still unstable. So while some families are building shelters here, others are staying in Gado 1, because of the delays in building infrastructure here. And there aren’t enough sealed jerry cans to store water – this leads to diarrhea and other illnesses.”
“In order to improve this situation, we’ve taken on responsibility for building and maintaining latrines, showers, water reserves and bore holes, along with the distribution of new jerry cans. Our goal is to meet the needs of the 6,000 refugees expected in this camp.” Recent predictions indicate that several tens of thousands of refugees from the CAR will cross the Cameroon border between September and the end of December, so our emergency team needs your support more than ever.
NB. Extracts from this article have already appeared on the website in a different form.
Cameroon
Context and action- 27.22 million inhabitants
- 151st out of 191 countries on the Human Development Index
- 25.532 people helped