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Drought in the horn of Africa (February 2006 update)

Related pages: Africa regional homepage | Millennium Development Goal 1: Poverty and Hunger | UK action on hunger in Africa


Sudan women waiting in food queueThe Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought for at least a decade. The Secretary of State for International Development visited the region in January 2006 and saw at first-hand the terrible effects this is having.

The UK is at the forefront of the international response. DFID has committed £35.9 million to the immediate relief effort in the worst affected countries - Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Eritrea. We are helping to provide food aid, water, health services and life saving nutritional therapy for children. We stand ready to do more, in these countries and the wider region.

We are also working to tackle the underlying causes of the persistent food crises affecting the region, and elsewhere in Africa. This includes a three-year commitment of £70 million to the Productive Safety Nets Programme which got underway in Ethiopia last year and is helping millions of people fight hunger.

DFID’s response to the immediate crisis

Hilary Benn announced an additional £15 million contribution to our response in Kenya on 1 March, bringing the total DFID commitment to the immediate relief effort in the Horn to £35.9 million: £7 million in Somalia, £21.7 million in Kenya, £5 million in Ethiopia and £2.1 million in Eritrea. Our contribution will help the United Nations (UN), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and governments to deliver urgently needed food aid, nutritional therapy, emergency water supplies and health care. We have also committed £700,000 to Tanzania and £3 million to Burundi, which are also facing food shortages.

In Ethiopia there are adequate food aid stocks available to meet immediate needs over the next couple of months, but both in Ethiopia and elsewhere other donors will need to follow our lead in ensuring that adequate resources are made available. Along with the US and the European Union (EU), we are in the forefront of the donor response.

A major challenge is to ensure that help gets to the worst affected areas. This is a particularly true in both Somalia and southern Ethiopia, where insecurity and conflict are hampering operations.

Our contribution is part of a wider effort we are making to help meet humanitarian needs in the region.

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The immediate problem

We have been carefully monitoring the situation in the Horn of Africa for many months and have been one of the leaders in the international response. The UK is the second largest bilateral donor in the response (after the US) and is also providing funding through the European Commission’s response.

The latest UN figures calculate that 7.4 million people are now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in the drought-affected areas. Without swift action, this figure could dramatically rise. Of these, 1.7 million are in southern Ethiopia, 1.7 million in Somalia, 3.5 million in northern Kenya, 0.5 million in Eritrea, and 66,000 in Djibouti.

Malnutrition rates are exceptionally high in the worst affected areas of southern Ethiopia, southern Somalia and northern Kenya, affecting between one in three and one in five children. Up to a million children are in need of emergency help.

The effects of the drought are also being felt in Tanzania – where we are providing £700,000 to the World Food Programme to help provide assistance for over 500,000 identified as ‘destitute’ in the Tanzanian government’s recent vulnerability assessment (announced in Tanzania on 24 February 2006). Further food surveys are currently being carried out, which will help in assessing the need for further assistance.

The drought is occurring in the midst of a situation of chronic food shortages. The UN has just revised upwards from 11 million to 17.75 million the total number of people it estimates are suffering from food shortages in the region as a whole (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya).

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Working towards long-term solutions

The Horn of Africa is highly vulnerable to drought, but even in years of good rains, millions go hungry. These are the chronically hungry – those that cannot get enough to eat at any time. The cause of chronic hunger is poverty, for example having no job or income, being unable to farm effectively (no labour and/or land) or being chronically sick (for example AIDS) or disabled.

That’s why we are trying to tackle the long-term causes of chronic hunger. For example, we have committed £70 million over three years to Ethiopia’s 'Productive Safety Nets' programme - which aims to tackle these problems before crises occur. This helped 5 million people in 2005 and aims to help 8.29 million people in 2006, and nearly 9 million people in 2007.

In the meantime, we will continue to respond to humanitarian crises as they occur. In the current financial year we expect to spend more than £175 million on humanitarian relief in Africa.

Key stats on response to food shortages elsewhere in Africa (since early 2005):

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More information

Last updated: 1 March 2006