World’s 10 most under-reported urgent humanitarian crises are in Africa — CARE’s report

Crises in Africa are being overlooked, with news about humanitarian emergencies on the continent buried beneath the weight of media attention focused elsewhere, according to a recent report by CARE International.
The 2023 report entitled ‘Breaking the Silence: Ten Humanitarian Crises That Didn’t Make Headlines in 2023’ lists ten forgotten humanitarian crises of last year, all of whom are taking place in Africa. Disappearing from public view are issues such as hunger in Angola, chronic malnutrition in Burundi and high child mortality in the Central African Republic, the authors have concluded. Climate change plays a huge role, the aid organization says, and more media attention is needed. This is the 8th edition of the ‘Breaking the Silence’ report where CARE International draws attention to the world’s “forgotten crises”.
The reasons for the low interest in Africa’s plight in the escalation of the two conflicts in the West, “the first is the continuation of the Russia-Ukraine war [and] the second trouble spot, namely the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza,” says Fredson Guilengue, an analyst from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg.Therefore, the global media is now focusing more on Europe and less on Africa or other places, whereby this trend will likely continue in 2024 as the wars continue. All of the ten humanitarian emergencies in 2022 and 2023, which have hardly been reported, took place in Africa, led for the second consecutive year by Angola. However, the Central African Republic (CAR) occupied a place in this sad list every year, according to the report.