This year, Soudre Amado, a small farmer in Burkin Faso, had to plant five times since the drought dried the seeds before they could grow. Photo: Irina Fuhrmann/Oxfam
The spectre of hunger is again stalking the people of the western Sahel, at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Thanks to the early-warning systems funded by Canada and other donors, we now know that a major food crisis is brewing. We know in time to head it off.
Late and irregular rainfall, followed by plagues of birds, locusts and other pests have decimated the harvests of poor farmers and made pasture scarce for herders. Cereal production in the five countries of the region is down by a quarter from last year and is well below the five-year average. In Mauritania and Chad farmers harvested barely half what they got last year. National food reserves exist, but they hold nowhere near the quantity needed to mitigate the deficit.
The international humanitarian response system will fail to cope with the expected rise in the number of people exposed to crises unless there are more resources closer to where disasters happen and there is more investment in preventing and reducing the risk of disasters, warned international agency Oxfam today.
In a new report, Crises in a New World Order, Oxfam said that while governments’ and agencies’ response to emergencies has greatly improved it still remains ‘too little, too late’ and is often determined by the vagaries of media and political interest rather than level of human need.
Six months ago Oxfam launched our biggest ever Africa appeal in response to the drought t in East Africa. Thanks to your generous response the public all over the world donated around $32 million to Oxfam. This response has saved countless lives and Oxfam continues to provide emergency and long-term support to nearly 3 million affected people across the region, helping them recover and cope with future droughts.
The crisis is one of the worst we have faced in many years – over 13 million people have been affected, thousands have died, and many families have lost their livelihoods. The situation remains extremely concerning, especially in Somalia. However, your help has gone a very long way. Thank you
Thousands of lives and millions of dollars lost due to late response to food crisis in East Africa
Lessons learnt can help prevent future disasters and save lives
Thousands of needless deaths occurred and millions of extra dollars were spent because the international community failed to take decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in East Africa, according to a new report by the international aid agencies Oxfam and Save the Children.
Standing on top of the water tower at Dadaab, you find yourself looking out over a barren, arid plain covered in hundreds of thousands of tents, stretching as far as the eye can see.
The world’s biggest refugee camp now holds over 450,000 people, with up to 1,500 more coming in every day, and even when you’re there, taking it in with your own eyes, it’s impossible to really take in those figures. Between the tents, people are walking to and from the water stations or simply wandering from tent to tent, hoping to find family, or people from their local communities.
Again and again, as I talked to people in the camp, they stressed how much they’d love to be able to work, and earn money to support their families. People are certainly willing, but there’s absolutely nothing to do. There’s nothing for anyone to sell, nowhere to grow anything. It’s almost like purgatory, in a way. People are just in limbo, waiting for the rains to come, for the political climate to change.
The provision of healthcare services in Mogadishu remains in crisis with very few doctors to deliver specialist care to patients in need. Niamh Cahill speaks to healthcare workers in the region
Forget about your troubles and imagine for a moment daily life in Somalia. Some 3.7 million people there are affected by drought and famine – a figure almost the same size as the population of Ireland. In Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, few doctors remain after many fled or were killed in fighting. Five hospitals with hugely depleted resources serve the needs of two million people. A community therapeutic care (CTC) programme delivered by SAA CID, a nongovernmental organisation founded in Somalia in 1990, in partnership with Oxfam, is trying to improve malnutrition among children under five years of age, as well as pregnant and lactating mothers.
In this region, the fate of families hangs on the health of their herds, and for this 15-year-old boy that means an enormous amount of responsibility. By Coco McCabe
A young herder tends to his cows in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson
He had the skinniest legs I think I’ve ever seen on a 15-year-old boy and one of the most disarming smiles, though it took a few minutes for that to appear. Being the mother of two boys and now, too soon, an empty-nester, I can’t help but notice these things.
He was standing next to a stretch of rough dirt road in front of a herd of cows so thin their ribs cast shadows on their hides. They were moving slowly in the heat of the morning, almost as if they were sleep walking. We were on our way to the village of Melka Guba in southern Ethiopia where drought has killed countless cattle and plunged millions of people into crisis. We had pulled over to wait for our colleagues who had stopped some miles back to repair a flat tire. When we finally turned our attention to our surroundings, there he was with his cows, studying our dust-coated truck. We were as curious to him as he was to us. We started to talk.
In Turkana, the failed rains, lack of available food and rising prices have left drought-affected communities dependent on outside aid.
Oxfam’s emergency cash transfer program, funded by the Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), a department of USAID, is helping to stimulate the local economy by working with 215 traders to boost their business and distribute monthly cash transfers to more than 5,500 drought-stricken families. This emergency cash offers people the choice to buy what they need and start alternative livelihoods to protect their assets in future droughts.
Kenya: A pastoralist woman stands under the shade of a tree
Lobunia Etoot holds his Oxfam registration card, Kenya
Kenya: Sabina Loliyak cooks a meal for her family
Waiting to collect their monthly cash transfers in Loruth, Kenya
Sabina Loliyak, Kenya
Kenya: Ekimat Maraha leaves a fingerprint to confirm cash receipt
Esinyem Maitha, Kenya
Jacinta runs a trader shop in the village of Nachukui, Kenya
Very interesting blog by Oxfam’s Duncan Green appeared in the Guardian today:
When it comes to natural disasters, and their very unnatural impact on poor people, prevention is better than cure. Yet this lesson seems incredibly hard to turn into practice. However good the early warning system in the run-up to disasters like the current crisis in east Africa, the money to head off future suffering often doesn’t start flowing until images of human pain hit the TV screens.
This is all the more frustrating because, as argued in a new paper by Oxfam’s humanitarian policy adviser, Debbie Hillier, we know far more than we used to about how to do this preventive work (known in development jargon as disaster risk reduction, or DRR) and how much more cost effective it is than reacting after disaster has struck. While it is too simplistic to give an overarching cost benefit ratio (often quoted as 1:4 or 1:7), studies have shown time and again that good prevention saves lives and money. Protecting livestock is much cheaper than starting afresh once they have been decimated by drought: in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the restocking of sheep and goats is 6.5 times more expensive than supplementary feeding, while restocking cattle costs 14 times more. According to the International Federation of Red Cross, it costs around £3.50 a person annually to build up resilience, compared to £150 a person for relief assistance for just three or four months.
