A deadly cocktail of calamities — including war, drought and rising prices — is engulfing the Horn of Africa, threatening its children with suffering of disastrous proportions, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) warned on Wednesday.
”A lethal mix of drought, expanding conflict, rising food and energy prices, disease and high poverty is pushing children and their families in the greater Horn of Africa to the brink of disaster,” Unicef said in a statement.
”Ethiopia and Somalia are the worst affected, but parts of Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda show ominously similar signs,” it added.
”The time to act is now to save children’s lives,” Per Engebak, Unicef’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, said in the statement.
Unicef said global acute malnutrition rates in Somalia topped 20%, while millions of people were food insecure in neighbouring Ethiopia.
It also sounded alarm bells over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Uganda’s pastoralist region of Karamoja, and said that an estimated 1,2-million people, many of them children, needed emergency food aid in Kenya. — AFP
