UGANDA: Ugandan floodwaters spread as fears mount over African downpours

Fears mounted on Monday (September 17) that downpours which have killed dozens in Africa, uprooted hundreds of thousands and devastated crops could continue past the end of the rainy season and hit areas that have so far escaped floods. Experts say the rising waters may hit as yet unaffected areas in the coming days, such as Uganda's central regions. Scores have died in more than a dozen countries often ravaged by droughts, but now inundated by torrential downpours destroying settlements and sweeping away crops and livestock -- cornerstones of Africa's developing economies. Across the continent, uprooted communities shelter in abandoned schools, churches and under plastic sheeting. Schoolboys carrying books above their heads wade through flooded fields, while villagers stand on the muddy wreckage of homes searching for missing family. Across east Africa, more than 90 people have now died from floods and the waterborne diseases that have followed -- at least 63 in Ethiopia alone. In west Africa, the U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA says floods have affected half a million people. The International Federation of the Red Cross says 87 people have been killed in the past two months, mostly in Nigeria. But those figures are rough estimates as hailstorms, mudslides and collapsed bridges wreak havoc with relief efforts. The U.N. World Food Programme says it needs $29 million in Uganda to fight the crisis in a country already burdened by thousands of refugees from neighbouring Congo and more than a million people living in war displacement camps in the north. With camps for the displaced fast swelling in countries across the centre of the world's poorest continent, experts say the threat of disease is mounting quickly.

ITN Source | September 18, 2007

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