From the Council on Foreign Relations, an excellent interactive map of The Horn:

Council on Foreign Relations – The Horn of Africa

A quote from the website:
“As violence in the Horn of Africa grabs international headlines, Western officials have become increasingly concerned that the region could become a haven for terrorist activity. Somalia’s last functioning government fell in 1991, and since then, intelligence officials believe several al-Qaeda operatives have sought refuge there. U.S. interest piqued when a group of Islamic fundamentalist militias threatened to take control of much of the country in 2006, only to be put down by an Ethiopian intervention.

Somalia is not the only source of strife in the region. Pockets of relative stability have become burdened by thousands of refugees, and bad blood between Ethiopia and Eritrea poses a perennial threat to the fragile region. “

Blowing the Horn
By John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen
From Foreign Affairs
April, 2007

Summary: The Greater Horn of Africa, the hottest conflict zone in the world, is a legitimate concern of U.S. officials. But their overwhelming focus on stemming terrorism there is overshadowing U.S. initiatives to resolve conflicts and promote good governance — with disastrous implications for regional stability and U.S. counterterrorism objectives themselves.

The piece is strongly opinionated, something NDP tries to stay away from, but Prendergast does outline the major problems facing the Horn with a clear and concise, country-by-country structure. These are nine pages that will dramatically enhance anyone’s understanding of the geopolitical dyanmics as they relate to counter-terrorism efforts within the region.

Key exerpt:

The Greater Horn of Africa — a region half the size of the United States that includes Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda — is the hottest conflict zone in the world. Some of the most violent wars of the last half century have ripped the region apart. Today, two clusters of conflicts continue to destabilize it. The first centers on interlocking rebellions in Sudan, including those in Darfur and southern Sudan, and engulfs northern Uganda, eastern Chad, and northeastern Central African Republic. The main culprit is the Sudanese government, which is supporting rebels in these three neighboring countries — and those states, which are supporting Sudanese groups opposing Khartoum. The second cluster links the festering dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea with the power struggle in Somalia, which involves the fledgling secular government, antigovernment clan militias, Islamist militants, and anti-Islamist warlords. Ethiopia’s flash intervention in Somalia in December temporarily secured the ineffectual transitional government’s position, but that intervention, which Washington backed and supplemented with its own air strikes, has sown the seeds for an Islamist and clan-based insurgency in the future.

Worth the read.

KENYA:
April, 2007
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled A Dam Connects Machakos, Kenya, To Archbold, Ohio, addressing issues highly relevant to the NDP cause.

Two key experpts stand out:
Residents of that small village and neighboring hamlets on the plains west of Todelo provided the money to construct the crude cement-and-stone dam, which is about 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Over the past four years, they have sold cattle and hosted an annual hamburger festival to raise more than $70,000. That money has helped build several hundred small-scale dams and water retention ponds in the Machakos area, delivering 5,000 families from drought and hunger…

They are farmers tilling a field largely neglected by the big international aid agencies: the economic development of small farming communities in Africa. While international aid for education and health projects and emergency food relief has grown over the past two decades, aid for agriculture and rural development has shrunk by more than half, contributing to increasing malnutrition and hunger…

Most impressive about this initiative is how a relatively small amount of money changed the lives of so many. A small group of neophytes, employing local fundraising efforts equivalent in complexity to those you might expect from high school kids trying to raise money for a prom, helped save lives and inspire hope. $70,000 raised over four years from events such as their annual “Burger Bash” helped make a lasting impact on a village in dire straits. It should act as reassurance that members of the Neutral Development Project are up to the challenge.

ETHIOPIA:
Projects by Partners in the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia:
- Installation of a flour mill in the North Wollo region. Wollo flour mill serves 1,500 families and the income is allocated by an elected committee for projects which benefit all of the villages.
- Two microfinance projects currently in place provide unemployed or underemployed women can start their own businesses
- After the first loan is repaid, women are entitled to larger loans.
- Protecting clean water sources like springs and artesian wells and digging shallow water wells.
- Renovations on a high school library and construction of a footbridge for access to medical services during rain season
- Establishment of a community peer education program to accurately inform inner city Addis Ababa residents about HIV.

DJIBUTI:
The Near East Foundation
In poor communities across the country, the Near East Foundation, in conjunction with local officials, is creating a credit based system of cooperative farms to combat the lack of resources, planning, and emergency funds available to the subsistence farming community. At around $5,000 per community, the goal is to create “a sound micro-finance culture within the country” and help move Djibouti’s farmers off of the vicious cycle of hand-to-mouth existence they’ve been living.

UGANDA & SUDAN:
Dunavant Cotton
…Then cotton growing revived in Uganda, and Dunavant Enterprises came to town about five years ago, paying cash on delivery. After three seasons of growing cotton for Dunavant, the world’s largest privately owned cotton broker and one of the biggest family-owned agribusinesses in the United States, Mr. Okelo, who owns less than three acres and has two wives and a passel of children, had saved $300, about double his annual earnings before Dunavant started buying his cotton.
Last summer, Mr. Okelo opened a small grocery store.

”Before Dunavant, no one came to help us,” says Mr. Okelo, 40, who has farmed a variety of crops in these parts for about 20 years.

…There is another reason for optimism about Africa: Some countries, including Sudan, Zimbabwe and Uganda, are growing much less cotton than they did in the past. So shifts in the cotton trade have raised hopes that Africans can ”go back to the future” and become a global cotton power, said Maggie Kigozi, chief of Uganda’s investment authority in Kampala.”
Source: New York Times, Out of Africa, Cotton and Cash, January 2007