Hardly any rain in the Horn of Africa again, ‘situation increasingly distressing’

The worst drought in decades in the Horn of Africa is not ending. The rainy season is practically over, but again there has been hardly any rainfall.

“In the last two years, about one and a half million people have been displaced in the region, with an increase in the past six months,” says Astrid van Genderen Stort. She is head of emergency at the UN refugee agency UNHCR and was recently in the region.

Many people are displaced, especially in Somalia and Ethiopia. In the entire Horn of Africa, according to Van Genderen Stort, 36 million people are affected by the drought. “It is becoming increasingly harrowing and much more attention needs to be paid to that.”

The prospects are bad for residents of parts of Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, among others. The land in that region has been bone dry for at least 2.5 years. Animals are dying and crops barely grow, resulting in conflicts and displaced inhabitants.

In Ethiopia alone, some 22 million people have too little to eat, estimates the German aid organization Welthunger. He speaks of the biggest humanitarian disaster in that country in fifty years.

Not only the drought is to blame for this, locust plagues, floods, corona and cholera outbreaks have also weakened Ethiopia. Added to this is the civil war in Tigray, although the warring factions have recently file locks. The situation is not much better in countries such as Somalia and Eritrea.

Correspondent Elles van Gelder was in Somalia last autumn to see the consequences of the drought:

The drought also exacerbates the ever-simmering conflicts between tribes. “I saw people who had lived in the Oromia area for years, but were not originally from there,” says Van Genderen Stort about her visit to the region. “They came up with stories of people being killed and even beheaded by people from other tribes they had lived peacefully alongside for years, while others were driven away and their lands taken. Prices have gone up, especially because of the Ukraine crisis .”

“Initially, we provide emergency aid to people who have nothing left,” says Van Genderen Stort, “but we also try to provide aid that is more sustainable. For example, can we distribute the little water that is available even more, can the small camps with displaced persons connected to a water supply or given some land so that they can work it and live on it in the long term We are discussing this with the government Sustainable aid of course costs a lot of work and money, but aid for a few months does not offer long-term solution.”

Aid organizations have raised the alarm about the food crisis more often in the past year. Van Genderen Stort is frustrated that the urgency often only becomes clear when a famine has been declared, which is not yet the case here. “In 2011 a famine was declared in this region, but by the time that happened it was already too late. Then women came in with dead children on their backs. During the drought in 2018, measures were taken that could have done the worst. This must also happen now, because otherwise the consequences are really incalculable.”