Longer-term support to help vulnerable children and families in East Africa is needed now more than ever. To donate, click HERE.
Under African Skies
As we write, news is spreading about the growing food emergency in northeast Africa, occurring in the Horn of Africa region, specifically where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya intersect.
Ethiopian children play "petty trade" outside their mud hut home.
As of mid-July, 2011, the World Food Program estimates that 10 million people need humanitarian aid. UNICEF estimates that more than two million children are malnourished and in need of lifesaving action.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), up to 2,000 refugees per day are crossing into Ethiopia and Kenya from Somalia – the hardest-hit of the countries – where civil war has raged for decades, causing deterioration of already desperate conditions and impoverishing even further millions of people.
Food Security in Uganda & Ethiopia
These Ugandan children receive nutritional supplements from Baylor, a CFTC partner in Uganda. Still, the look of hunger in their eyes is unmistakable.
CFTC is an international development agency that delivers meaningful, sustainable change by funding local partner projects in four key development sectors: health, nutrition, education and livelihoods.
These support the broader objective of increasing food security and reducing hunger by alleviating poverty.
While we are not an emergency relief or humanitarian aid organization, if crisis directly affects our partners or beneficiaries, we immediately evaluate options to raise funds to support emergency relief, as we did in Haiti after the January, 2010 earthquake and during the cholera outbreak in late 2010.
We fund and manage projects through local partners in Uganda and Ethiopia, two drought-susceptible East African countries. Both countries have made strides in reducing poverty in recent years. But in this year’s annual report on achievements toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), released in early July, the UN acknowledged that progress towards eradicating hunger by 2015 is lagging.
Although none of our partners in Uganda or Ethiopia are located in areas directly affected by the current Horn of Africa drought, some rural communities in the broader region of East Africa (which consists of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi) have had a long dry season. This has delayed planting, and made it hard for crops to ripen and dry for harvest. It will have a serious impact on the income these families rely on from the sale of their crops.
While the Horn of Africa drought raises world-wide awareness of an urgent and growing crisis, food insecurity is in fact a pre-existing and longer-term issue for East African countries overall, for a number of reasons.
Rising Food and Fuel Prices
The escalation of food prices driven largely by fuel and transport costs is a large part of the reason why achievement of the 2015 MDGs are in question. In both Uganda and Ethiopia, food costs have tripled and quadrupled in 2011. The price of maize – a significant source of calories in the east African diet – has risen by 114% and 117% respectively in Uganda and Ethiopia since the same time last year (sources: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and World Bank).
Another factor – especially severe in Uganda – is high HIV/AIDS rates that leave many grandparent- or child-led families with no source of income. Malnutrition further compromises immune systems and makes adherence to anti-retroviral therapy, where it is even available, very difficult. Mortality rates from HIV/AIDS escalate, and poverty’s vicious circle ensnares more and more vulnerable people, most of them children.
It is the lack of income, not necessarily the scarcity of food, that is the real crux of the food insecurity problem. As CFTC Executive Director Debra Kerby recently blogged from Uganda, “what we are seeing each day is that hunger is not about the lack of food … but about access to food and the ability to afford it.”
Climate Change
Children and families in Ethiopia are among the most at risk from deforestation, soil erosion and drought.
But perhaps the biggest contributor to the situation we are witnessing in the Horn of Africa is climate change. Back-to-back poor rainy seasons have led to the driest conditions in the region since 1951. What once was a 10-year drought cycle has escalated to every two years, giving the nutrient-depleted soils and deforested landscape little time to recover.
The shorter time between droughts takes its toll on those trying to make a living from the soil, too. Farmers of east Africa – with limited financial resources and facing the urgent need to feed their livestock and their families – are rarely able to build up any income or savings. Without income or savings, it is more difficult for them to apply modern, sustainable agricultural practices.
According to Geoffrey Livingston, International Fund for Development (IFAD)’s regional economist for the Horn of Africa, measures to build “drought-resiliency” are imperative. IFAD suggests such things as: training farmers in harvesting techniques for low-rain seasons; greater use of drought-resistant seeds; improving on-farm storage capacity; and advocating for proactive government efforts to provide emergency services for herders, including feed supplements and financing for fodder.
If these measures are not put in place, Livingston warns, these cycles of devastation may start to be seen on a yearly basis.
It is extremely hard for people to break free from the grip of poverty and hunger in these types of environments. Food aid, while vital, is a band-aid: the ounce of prevention needed is the kind of sustainable poverty relief that comes from improving access to education and income generation through good livelihoods.
The Solution to Food Insecurity: Eradicating Extreme Poverty
The UN’s first MDG is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger among the world’s poorest people. CFTC’s approach to that goal (among others) is founded on two key principles:
- Sustainability: ensuring the programs we fund have improvement goals that can be maintained in the long-run, such as training local farmers in the use of ecologically-sound and modern agricultural methods
- Capacity-building: focusing on projects that are community-driven and community-led to build self-sufficiency, such as local small business groups who promote and fund long-term income generation opportunities
Chollo, Ethiopia: Women's Farming Group weeds cabbage and carrot crops. Sustainable agriculture is key to meeting the UN's hunger reduction goal by 2015.
These principles offer the best hope for solutions to the complex and linked problems of poverty and hunger. They are the foundation for long-term change: both pulling communities out of poverty and building their resilience against natural disasters, like droughts, whether they experience them directly or indirectly.
At the same time, Canadian Feed The Children is meeting the tangible, practical needs of those living at subsistence levels in these fragile environments. Through the generous support of donors, we provide:
- tools, seeds and equipment for community and family gardens
- primary health care and nutritional support for children and pregnant or breast-feeding mothers who are at greatest risk
- clean water sources, water purification and oral re-hydration
- high-energy stoves and solar cookers (vital to reduce the reliance on firewood for cooking, a major cause of deforestation)
- nutritional supplements such as Plumpy’nut and AK-1000 to prevent malnutrition
We also fund the building of new classrooms and schools, support teacher training and provide desks, textbooks, writing materials and uniforms to remove barriers to education – another Millennium Development Goal – so that communities have long-term strategies to escape the cycle of poverty.
And, over the past several years, we have increasingly been involved in establishing self-help groups, farming collectives, village savings and loans associations and vocational training programs that integrate many of the essential features of best-practice approaches to poverty and hunger reduction aligned with the MDGs.
Our local partners are making strides toward improving the lives of thousands in Ethiopia and Uganda. But, the wolf is always at the door when it comes to food security in the Horn of Africa. It will be innovative solutions that involve the local communities, and the ongoing support of generous donors who maintain a long-term vision, that will tame it.
To support children, families and communities in eastern Africa, please consider a one-time or monthly donation, or becoming a child sponsor to a child in Uganda or Ethiopia. For just $20 per month, you can support the kind of long-term, sustainable income generation and food security programs that are the best strategies to alleviate hunger and poverty now and in the long-term.
