East African leaders on Monday called for a combined regional effort to combat a searing drought that has claimed scores of lives and put millions of people on the verge of starvation.
”In order to address the challenges effectively, we need to detail our cooperation and develop concerted sub-regional approaches and strategies that will create an environment favourable for socio-economic development,” Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki told participants opening the 11th summit of the seven-nation Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad).
”It is therefore incumbent for us to develop new strategies that adequately address the development challenges facing our region,” Kibaki added.
The outgoing Igad chairperson, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, called for insurance for people affected by famine and to enhance regional trade as a means to stave off the effects of the scorching drought.
”We need and we can work together to insure this area against these vicissitudes … We should also have an intra-regional trade to ensure the supply of food from food-supply areas to food-deficit areas,” Museveni said.
”Since there are insurance policies, why don’t we have insurance policies against famine in Africa?” Museveni added.
Early this month, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced the world’s first insurance cover for humanitarian emergencies in Ethiopia, a chronically hungry Horn of Africa nation, in the event of extreme drought.
The agency also warned of large-scale deaths in Kenya, where about 3,5-million people are threatened by starvation, if donors delayed delivery of food aid, despite the Nairobi government’s assurances it has enough food to last through mid-year.
The one-day summit was also expected to cover the progress in the implementation of a Sudan peace agreement, agreed in January 2005, and efforts to restore government in Somalia and end a 15-year power vacuum there.
Participants also said they may also focus on the increase in tensions between Horn of Africa foes Ethiopia and Eritrea — both of them Igad members — over their unresolved frontier dispute, which has threatened to escalate into a full-scale war in recent months.
Officials said the summit would discuss recommendations by the bloc’s council of ministers, which met last week, including setting up a special fund to combat the effects of drought.
The European Union’s development and humanitarian commissioner, Louis Michel, pledged to help strengthen such an initiative.
The current drought ”requires the development of rapid response mechanisms such as disaster or drought relief fund”, Michel said, pledging EU support for such an initiative.
Besides Kibaki, who is the bloc’s incoming chairperson, and Museveni, the meeting was attended by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Somalia’s Abdullahi Yusuf, Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh, Sudan’s Omar El-Bashir. Eritrea was represented by Agriculture Minister Arefaine Berhe.
Formed in 1986 as the Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Development — later changed to Igad — the East African bloc gained instant recognition after successfully mediating an end to 21 years of fighting between the successive Khartoum governments and the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. – Sapa-AFP