DAKAR (AlertNet) Â? Burkina Faso's children risk finding their classrooms full when they start the new school year next month.
Floods have left some 50,000 people homeless after the heaviest rains in nearly a century in some parts of the poor, landlocked west African country, and most are now camping out in primary and secondary schools.
They fear what will happen to them when the schoolchildren come back.
Â?Some people told us we would have to leave the school for another site so that children can come to class, but no one has said when or where and how,Â? said Sayouba Ouedraogo, sheltering with his family at a school in the capital Ouagadougou.
Most of the 88 temporary shelters for the flooding homeless are primary and secondary schools, whose teachers are due back at work next week already.
If authorities set up larger shelter sites for them, these would also need temporary schools themselves for thousands of displaced children who need to continue their education, a Belgian Red Cross official in Burkina Faso said.
Burkina Faso is among the countries hardest hit by seasonal floods which have disrupted the lives of about 600,000 West Africans since June, according to the United Nations.
The U.N., which says the rains in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone have killed almost 160 people since June, made an emergency appeal on Friday for an extra $18.4 million to help 150,000 people in Burkina Faso.
Â?I hope donors will respond rapidly to help the survivors of these devastating floods, which have hit many people who were desperately poor to begin with,Â? said U.N. emergency relief coordinator John Holmes.
In a country more accustomed to droughts, the heaviest rainfall in 90 years fell on Ouagadougou, flooding half the city, washing away bridges, dams and mud-brick homes built near canals or on flood plains.
Â?Those displaced are the poorest of the poor, their homes have been flattened they donÂ?t have money to reconstruct, and they do not know what they are going to do,Â? Lane Hartill of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) told AlertNet.
Burkinabe authorities have said they would not allow inhabitants who built their homes in risk-prone zones to rebuild in these areas but they have not established where they would relocate them.
Â?What we want is means to leave this school and build somewhere,Â? displaced Ouedraogo told AlertNet by telephone. Â?We need land to build on even if it is in our villages of origin because we cannot stand these camps any longer.Â?
Relief agencies have warned that the poor water and sanitation in some sites where up to 1,000 people share a single tap and three toilets could lead to an outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases.
�In one site I visited, the water provision system relied on the school�s water tank � so there is a risk of water shortage,� Yéréfolo Mallé, head of the international non-governmental organisation WaterAid in Burkina Faso, told AlertNet.
On Thursday, the CRS delivered up to 30 back-up water tanks to 30 sites in a bid to prevent any shortage. It is also building filtration systems.
The European Union has given $4.3 million for humanitarian assistance to flood victims in West Africa and particularly Burkina Faso, whose government estimates it would need $155 million for immediate humanitarian relief and to rebuild infrastructure.
The United Nations says urban poverty in Burkina Faso doubled between 1994
and 2003. In the last two years, sharp rises in food and fuel prices have exacerbated poverty. Even before the flooding, more than one in six children died before they reached the age of five.
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