Drought in the Sahel region of West Africa has brought hunger to millions of people for the third time in recent years. Meanwhile, conflict in Mali has forced at least 300,000 people to flee their homes, adding to the hunger crisis both in Mali and neighbouring countries. WFP and its partners have launched a regional response to bring food assistance to more than 9 million people in eight countries.
Learn more about the Sahel Crisis from the World Food Programme and check out their interactive map.
Child malnutrition in Somalia at dire levels - ICRC
GENEVA, July 13 (Reuters) - One in 10 children in parts of drought-hit Somalia is at risk of starving to death, twice as many as recently as March, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday.
Malnutrition rates were believed to be significantly higher in other conflict-torn parts of central and southern Somalia, where few aid groups have been allowed to bring food relief.
“Levels of malnutrition have reached a new peak and are currently the highest in the world,” the ICRC said in a statement.
The independent aid agency, one of very few with access to Somalia’s worst-hit areas, said that even in the Bay and Lower Shabelle regions, the traditional breadbaskets, nearly 11 percent of children under five had severe acute malnutrition.
This meant they were at risk of starving to death. Rates were believed to be significantly higher in other areas.
UNICEF correspondent Kun Li reports on the organization’s response to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa and a visit by UNICEF Regional Director Elhadj As Sy to a settlement in north-eastern Kenya for Somali refugees from drought and conflict.
Relief for the Horn of Africa
The drought in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya has been called the “worst humanitarian disaster” by the United Nations. An estimated 10 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.
If you can spare a few bucks, please donate to the relief effort.
These are just the organizations that have set up funds for this specific emergency. Other organizations like Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) are working in the region but haven’t (to my knowledge) set up a specific fund for drought relief.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees
International Rescue Committee
Horn of Africa drought: Somalia aid supplies boosted
An Islamic aid agency has started distributing aid in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, following the lifting of a ban on aid work by al-Shabab militants.
Two decades of conflict mean Somalia is the country worst affected by the Horn of Africa drought.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) gave out dried food such as maize to some of the thousands of people who have fled to the capital recently.
An OIC official urged other aid groups to resume work in Somalia.
Some 10 million people are said to be affected by the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in 60 years.
An estimated 3,000 people a day are arriving from Somalia in neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia seeking assistance.
UN envoy to Somalia Mark Bowden has also arrived in Mogadishu to assess the humanitarian situation and discuss how the UN can help.
At the weekend, UN refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres urged aid agencies to go into Somalia to help drought victims, if obstacles of security can be overcome.
“People are suffering. We need to take action immediately to save the Somali people,” the OIC’s Ahmed Mohamed Aden told the BBC.
UN: Somalia drought is worst humanitarian crisis
DADAAB, Kenya (AP) — The head of the U.N. refugee agency said Sunday that drought-riddenSomalia is the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world after meeting with refugees who endured unspeakable hardship to reach the world’s largest refugee camp.
The Kenyan camp, Dadaab, is overflowing with tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees forced into the camp by the parched landscape in the region where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya meet. The World Food Program estimates that 10 million people already need humanitarian aid. The U.N. Children’s Fund estimates that more than 2 million children are malnourished and in need of lifesaving action.
Antonio Guterra, the head of UNHCR who visited Dadaab on Sunday, appealed to the world to supply the “massive support” needed by thousands of refugees showing up at this camp every week. More than 380,000 refugees now live there.
In Dadaab, Guterra spoke with a Somalia mother who lost three of her children during a 35-day walk to reach the camp. Guterra said Dadaab holds “the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.”
“I became a bit insane after I lost them,” said the mother, Muslima Aden. “I lost them in different times on my way.”
Guterra is on a tour of the region to highlight the dire need. On Thursday he was in the Ethiopian camp of Dollo Ado, a camp that is also overflowing.
“The mortality rates we are witnessing are three times the level of emergency ceilings,” he said. “The level of malnutrition of the children coming in is 50 percent. That is enough to explain why a very high level of mortality is inevitable,” he said.
Dr. Dejene Kebede, a health officer for UNHCR, said there were 58 deaths in camps in one week alone in June.
You can donate to the UNHCR Somali Emergency fund here.
An elderly woman is given water. Many of the elderly are too weak and sick to feed themselves or drink. Photo: Jehad Nga for The New York Times
Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya’s Hopes
LOKORI, Kenya — The sun somehow feels closer here, more intense, more personal. As Philip Lolua waits under a tree for a scoop of food, heat waves dance up from the desert floor, blurring the dead animal carcasses sprawled in front of him.
So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.
“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.
A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.
The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.
Ethiopia. Sudan. Somalia. Maybe even Niger and Chad. These countries have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya? This nation is one of the most developed in Africa, home to a typically robust economy, countless United Nations offices and thousands of aid workers.
The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.
Some government officials have even been implicated in a scandal to illegally sell off thousands of tons of the nation’s grain reserves as a famine was looming.
So far, a huge, international aid operation to avert mass hunger has not kicked in, or at least not to the degree needed. The United Nations World Food Program recently said that nearly four million Kenyans — about a tenth of the population — urgently needed food.
“Red lights are flashing across the country,” the agency said.
But donor nations have been slow to respond, and a United Nations-led emergency appeal for $576 million is less than half financed.
