More than 6 million Syrians, encompassing 1.2 million families, are displaced inside their own country. Slowly some are returning to their neighbourhoods, but often all they find is destruction.

More than five decades of armed conflict in Colombia have uprooted some 7.4 million people within the country’s borders. Many have fled to informal settlements and struggled to survive without access to decent housing, water and sanitation. In Nueva Esperanza – “New Hope” in English – residents are finally getting access to basic rights, thanks to UNHCR, and a formal identity for their community of forcibly displaced.

This article originally appeared on the OHCHR website. Reposted with permission.

Ms. Sonoda was living in Fukushima, Japan, with her husband and their child in a beautiful natural environment and with a strong local community. The day of the nuclear disaster, 11 March 2011, they felt an enormous earthquake and unrelenting aftershocks. They later saw the explosion of reactor one, live on television.

“It was a massive shock. We began preparing in case we needed to move quickly and two days later reactor three exploded,” she recalls. “We decided to evacuate because we knew reactor three used MOX [Mixed Oxide] fuel which contains plutonium. It was a nightmare. Suddenly the nuclear disaster destroyed our lives in Fukushima.”

With the Mayor and the […]

This article originally appeared on OCHA’s website. Reposted with permission.

Close to one million people are believed to be displaced around Gedeo and West Guji Zones – in the Oromia and SNNP regions, respectively – due to escalating inter-communal violence since early June 2018.  Authorities in Gedeo registered more than 793,000 displaced, while at least 185,000 are believed to be in West Guji zone, where registration is still limited due to insecurity.

IDPs are mostly settled with already food insecure relatives or residing in cramped public buildings at the most densely populated parts of the country. Food has been provided by Government, while emergency shelter and Non-Food Items have been provided by both the Government and humanitarian partners.

Last week, the Government […]