NAIROBI, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Donors are not responding fast enough to an unprecedented drought in Ethiopia, aid agencies say.
The agencies said more than 400,000 children younger than five are severely malnourished despite strong economic growth and big development gains over the last decade.
Ethiopia is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years, and 10.2 million people, which is one-tenth of the population, cannot feed themselves because their crops and animals have died.
“We’ve definitely been ringing the alarm since last summer, but I think, sadly, sometimes it takes pictures of children suffering to get people to actually take things seriously,” said Carolyn Miles, president of Save the Children in the United States, after visiting Ethiopia’s Afar and Amhara regions.
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One-quarter of the $1.4 billion needed to respond to the crisis has been pledged, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, but most of these contributions have not yet been paid.
In a malnutrition centre in the northeastern lowlands of Afar, Miles met a little boy who had been admitted for severe malnutrition for the second time in two months.
“Sending kids back into a situation where they don’t have enough food to really stay out of severe malnutrition, some of those kids are really suffering,” she said.
Ethiopia is the charity’s humanitarian priority globally.
Africa’s second most populous nation has been hit by two consecutive failed rains, most recently because of El Nino, which is causing hunger around the globe.
