AFTERMATH: National mourning as rescue efforts under way following the devastating Cyclone Idai

Cyclone Idai: Rescue efforts on, 15 000 stranded in Mozambique

The United Nations has described the floods in Southern Africa as "hugely complex" and has said it would require an "even more complex response", Al-Jazeera reports.

Devastation can be seen everywhere. Strong winds and heavy rains have destroyed houses and crops.

About 15 000 people, many of them ill, are still stranded more than a week after cyclone Idai struck.

High heels, skis, woollen blankets: what not to send to a tropical island when disaster strikes

The problem of unsolicited donations often flies under the radar, but it’s a crucial issue for disaster responders throughout the globe.

Unsolicited donations arrive unannounced, often with zero paperwork, meaning no one is expecting the shipment and no one is there to claim responsibility. Local authorities have to manually sort, classify, and repackage usable aid items, while disposing of the rest. After Cyclone Winston hit Fiji in 2016, workers there spent thousands of hours sifting through more than 130 shipping containers, according to a 2017 Australian Red Cross report.

Sending cash is also far more efficient. Chané says the price of shipping three litres of water to Fiji from Australia, for example, would equal the cost of sourcing 9 100 litres of water on the ground – enough to meet the daily needs of 600 people. - (The New Humanitarian)

Cyclone Idai deaths could exceed 1 000 as need for aid grows

Even as flood waters began to recede in parts of Mozambique on Friday, fears rose that the death toll could soar as bodies are revealed.

The number of deaths could be beyond the 1 000 predicted by the country's president earlier this week, said Elhadj As Sy, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. - (AP)

Death toll from cyclone surpasses 500 in southern Africa

The confirmed death toll in Zimbabwe, neighbouring Mozambique and Malawi surpassed 500 on Thursday, with hundreds more feared dead in towns and villages that were completely submerged.

Aid agencies and several governments continued to step up their deployments, with helicopters in short supply for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the cyclone.

Zimbabwe's defence minister said more than 120 bodies had been washed into neighbouring Mozambique, where residents there buried them, and more bodies were still being recovered in rivers, raising the official death toll in the country to at least 259. - (AP)

Cyclone Idai: SADC countries 'completely unprepared' for disaster, says Sisulu

South Africa's capacity to identify and respond to natural disasters has "gone down" and is worse than it was in 1999, International Relations and Cooperation Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told Parliament on Wednesday.

She added that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is and was "completely unprepared" for Cyclone Idai and other natural disaster events of this magnitude.

Sisulu stated, in reference to the cyclone making landfall in Zimbabwe, that "we didn't detect a cyclone, we thought it was just unseasonally heavy rains". She said the damage "was beyond the [capacity of] support of South Africa".

'Women, babies trapped in trees' after deadly Mozambique storm

Rescue workers in Mozambique are racing against time to save hundreds of people clinging onto roofs and trees around the devastated city of Beira, days after a powerful cyclone triggered flash floods, submerging entire villages and wiping out communities across southeastern Africa.

Aid workers on Wednesday spoke of women trapped in trees "throwing their babies" onto rescue boats and plucking people from head-deep water, only to strand them in patches of land where the water reached their ankles.