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In the News
- The bombs have no author: The ongoing US and Israeli attack on Iran, which began on 28 February, is being covered with deliberate obfuscation as to responsibility. Among humanitarians, the preferred term for the attacks (and Iran’s retaliation) seems to be “a significant military escalation” as per the IFRC and NRC’s Jan Egeland. Save the Children calls it “an escalating conflict”. Compare this with its statement 3 years ago on the war in Ukraine which identified “Russia’s military operation” as the cause of child deaths and displacements. The International Rescue Committee has also issued a statement decrying the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and regional airspaces in the Gulf, with President and CEO David Miliband saying “the war on Iran” is unleashing “a triple emergency” but not mentioning who is behind the war. Others have not been as restrained: in a notable inversion, the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, called it Iran’s War With Israel and the United States. Go figure.
In the Spotlight
Blame it on the rain: A coalition led by Action Against Hunger and local partners has appealed for KES 24 billion (~$185 million) to assist 3.3 million people in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) facing acute hunger. The appeal, like most of its kind, is framed as a response to drought. What it doesn’t mention is that in 2012, the Kenyan government adopted a national strategy – the Ending Drought Emergencies (EDE) plan – committing to end the worst of the suffering caused by drought by 2022. That deadline passed. Kenya is now on EDE Phase II, running to 2032, with a cabinet secretary describing the original phase as having “laid an important foundation” – a careful formulation for a missed target.
The appeal also does not mention that the crisis was not a surprise. FEWS NET had forecast it months in advance. Nor does it note that the drought cycle in Kenya’s ASALs has compressed sharply – from once a decade, to every five years, to every two or three years, and now effectively annual – a structural change that emergency appeals are not designed to address. The voices of local communities on external assistance, and how they are themselves responding, are absent.
Ironically, since the appeal was published, flooding has killed dozens across the country. In April 2024, nearly 170 people perished in a similar deluge despite reports that the government had spent Ksh 35 billion (~$270 million) on flood mitigation over the past four years. That too is being attributed to the weather.
Focus on Ethics
Whose crisis gets counted? Global health reports are not neutral documents. They are produced by institutions with significant authority over how suffering is understood, measured, and acted upon. That authority carries ethical obligations not just to technical accuracy, but to the choices embedded in the act of measurement: what to aggregate, what to name, and whose crisis warrants acknowledgement.
The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation's 2025 report illustrates what happens when those obligations go unexamined.
The report's headline comparison, that under-five mortality in sub-Saharan Africa is 19 times higher than in Australia and New Zealand, treats "sub-Saharan Africa" as an analytically coherent category. It isn't one. Its internal variation is so wide that regional averages obscure more than they reveal. And comparing a region of nearly 50 countries and over a billion people to two countries whose combined population is dwarfed by Kenya’s alone hardly seems warranted.
Further, the certainty of its headlines disguises the uncertainty in the data. For example, the report acknowledges significant variations in the availability of data – in high-income countries, the data is on average 2.1 years old; in the poorest, it is 8 years old. In places like the State of Palestine, the uncertainty surrounding its 2024 mortality figures reflects a near-total collapse of reliable data collection during the ongoing genocide. The danger is that by the time its figures circulate into press releases, media coverage, and policy discussions, the uncertainty intervals, data lags, and modelling assumptions have disappeared, and what remains is a narrative of precision that the underlying data cannot support.
The report is also notable for what it buries. Its data tables suggest the State of Palestine may be the only humanitarian crisis setting where child mortality outcomes may have actually worsened between 2000 and 2024 though, as noted, the data is uncertain. Every other high-profile crisis, from Yemen to Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Afghanistan, recorded improvements. Yet there is no mention of Gaza in the report. There is no narrative discussion, no methodological flag, no acknowledgement of what the data cannot capture.
What ethical reporting would look like: It would name the limits of its own models in the same register as its headline claims. It would disaggregate categories whose internal variation undermines their analytical value. It would apply the same methodological standards to all crisis settings regardless of their political salience. And it would recognise that the selection of which crises warrant acknowledgement is itself a moral choice, one that should be made explicitly.
Behind the Press Release
The Optics of migration: IOM’s $91 million Africa appeal
On 18 February, the UN’s migration agency, IOM, launched a $91 million Migrant Response Plan covering migration corridors from the Horn of Africa through to Southern Africa. The language is humanitarian: 2025 was “the deadliest year on record” on the Eastern Route. What the press release doesn’t mention is that IOM has long been critiqued for effectively outsourcing EU border control objectives under a humanitarian framing, and that an Oxfam report found EU migration aid in Africa routinely breaches development aid rules by reorienting funds toward deterrence.The appeal also sits within a broader narrative that pathologises African movement while treating European and American movement as unremarkable. IOM’s own data shows that roughly 19.5 million Africans lived outside the continent in 2020 – almost identical to the 19 million Europeans living outside Europe in the same year, despite Africa having roughly double the population. Meanwhile, a record number of Americans are now relocating overseas to escape rising costs, crime, and political instability, generating lifestyle features, not the emergency appeals that similar movement by Africans elicits.
The takeaway: The framing of African migration as an emergency requiring containment is a political choice, not a demographic reality. Appeals that reproduce it uncritically are part of the architecture that sustains it.
That’s a wrap from the narrative front lines.
The Decolonise How? Digest is funded through a grant from Pledge For Change.