The World Food Programme (WFP) says it now requires U.S.$473 million to scale up its humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia for the next six months.
WFP had earlier said it required U.S.$226.5 million to provide full rations for refugees across East Africa from April to September 2022.
The United Nations entity, in a recent statement, warned that the number of hungry people, due to drought, could spiral from the currently estimated 14 million to 20 million through 2022 in the three countries.
Data from the Intergrated Food Security Classification (IPC) shows that about 2.1 million people in Kenya are highly food insecure due to failed rains, low agricultural production and high food prices and over 650,000 children under five and over 96,000 pregnant or lactating women are acutely malnourished.
A large-scale, climate-induced, humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the Horn of Africa, and in Somalia, 4.1 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, data from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) shows.
In Ethiopia, 28 percent of women are thin or malnourished and 38 percent of children suffer from stunting, according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Development Diaries had reported in February 2022 the impact of three consecutive failed rainy seasons since late 2020 in Ethiopia’s lowland regions.
‘We know from past experience that acting early to avert a humanitarian catastrophe is vital, yet our ability to launch the response has been limited due to a lack of funding to date’, WFP’s Regional Director for Eastern Africa, Michael Dunford, said in the statement.
‘WFP and other humanitarian agencies have been warning the international community since last year that this drought could be disastrous if we [did not] act immediately, but funding has failed to materialise at the scale required’.
WFP also noted that the situation has been compounded by the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the cost of food and fuel soaring to unprecedented highs.
Photo source: WFP/Woojung Kim
