Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: African Nation Niger Faces Famine, 08/01/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/niger_8-01.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Name a few countries in Africa. Do you know where Niger is? What do you about the country/region?

2. What are some of the causes of a famine?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What caused the food shortage?

A severe drought and a rare invasion of locusts wiped out much of Niger's food crop last year and led to the start of a famine affecting an estimated 3.6 million people in the mostly desert country of 11.3 million people.

2. What is the region like?

All three countries sit along the semi-arid strip of land south of the Sahara and north of the Sudan region known as the Sahel. The region receives the same amount of rain as the driest parts of the United States - around 6 to 20 inches of rainfall a year.

The region's inhabitants, mostly nomadic farmers and cattle herders, survive by taking their herds north during the driest season and south during the rainy season.

3. How did the international community respond to initial requests for aid?

Calls for emergency assistance from the government nine months ago and U.N. appeals for aid to West Africa, were largely ignored before the media picked up on the story, U.N. officials have said.

Of the $196 million the United Nations requested for West Africa for 2005, the organization received only 39 percent of the funds, Kristen Knutson, an OCHA spokeswoman, told the Associated Press.

4. What kind of aid is Niger receiving?

Last week, the United Nations said it would begin airlifting 44 tons of emergency food to Niger.

Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, has already given donated 1,000 tons of grain to its neighbor.

The United States has pledged about $6 million to the famine.

 

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. If the technological advances of the past few centuries have made food much easier to produce and distribute, why are there still famines?

2. What does the international community do to monitor regions that are at risk for famines?

2. Given the Sahel's harsh climate, what can the region to do protect its crops?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.