A searing drought that has put at least 11-million people across East Africa on the brink of starvation risks turning into a catastrophe if donors fail to respond quickly to the situation, an aid agency warned on Thursday.
With drought-related human deaths already reported in Kenya and Somalia, cattle, camels and donkeys are also dying at an alarming rate in some areas and the situation may worsen with further delays, Oxfam International said in a statement.
”Although some funding is starting to come through, the response so far is dwarfed by the immediate need. Donors need to frontload their efforts so that action can be taken now; money given in three months will be too late for many,” said Paul Smith-Lomas, the group’s head in East Africa.
Oxfam urged the United Nations’s special humanitarian envoy to the Horn of Africa, Kjell Bondevik, who is currently visiting Kenya ”to push donors for a swifter response to an escalating food crisis that threatens 11-million people”.
Of the $574-million (€482-million) requested to fund fund humanitarian response in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, donors have committed $186-million (€156-million), leaving a shortfall of about $388-million (€327-million), the aid group said, citing figures from the World Food Programme (WFP).
It urged Bondevik ”to establish a strong mechanism to coordinate a regional response to the crisis [to] help avoid unbalanced interventions, which creates the risk of people relocating to where aid is, increasing tension and conflict due to competition for scarce resources”.
On Tuesday, Bondevik, deployed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to assess the humanitarian situation, said he was ”alarmed” by the impact of the devastating drought that has put millions of people in the threat of starvation.
”It’s a dead end. The livestock have started dying from this drought, and now it is our turn,” Ethiopian elder Buke Arero told the Oxfam assessment team that visited southern Ethiopia, where livestock owners have resorted to feeding their animals the thatch from their huts.
”The situation in many parts of the region are increasingly bleak,” Oxfam said.
Weathermen have said that the expected long rains could delay further worsening the current drought, the worst in the recent years, and further exacerbating suffering in the affected regions.
”The meteorological forecasts suggest yet another set of failed rains. This would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe even worse than the current situation,” said Smith-Lomas.
At least 40 people, mainly children in northern Kenya, have died of drought-related malnutrition and associated illness since December along with thousands of livestock.
In Somalia, dehydration has killed at least seven people in the past month as severe water shortages from the severe drought force many to drink their own urine, according to Oxfam. – Sapa-AFP