Months of scorching drought have left 40Â 000 children in the Horn of Africa at imminent risk of dying of hunger, the United Nations warned on Monday as it launched a new appeal for emergency aid.
Torrential rains last month only made the situation worse, killing many of the cattle that had survived the previous six months of drought and bringing malaria and other disease, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said.
”About 40Â 000 children are so malnourished that they face the prospect of death in the months ahead,” Unicef’s deputy executive director Rima Saleh said in a report released in Geneva.
”This drought has killed up to half the animal population of pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Rain doesn’t bring that back. A pastoralist without a herd is like a farmer without seeds.”
Unicef said that about half the 16-million nomadic populations scattered across outlying regions of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, including 1,6-million children, were in need of emergency aid.
It recalled that a previous drought in 2000 killed nearly 100Â 000 people in the same region.
However, donor nations have only provided a third of the $80-million appeal launched by Unicef, which appealed on Monday for more cash to come in.
UN agencies are also adapting the way they deliver their aid, in order to better meet the needs of nomads regularly facing food shortages. One such way has been to establish mobile feeding programmes for children. — AFP
