East Africa hunger crisis: Advocacy resources

As Rick introduced, my name is Elizabeth and I come from Kenya. I'm specifically here representing the Horn of Africa. I've been visiting communities in Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda recently. Just with the focus of this current drought that we are experiencing right now in the Horn of Africa. I know most of you may be reflecting back and saying “oh, but we've always heard about hunger crises in Africa or the Horn of Africa”, I'll tell you over the last ten, twelve years a lot of investment has gone into place. And drought has been a cycle. We've had cyclic droughts that we've been able to manage But right now, what we're experiencing it's something that I personally have been in the humanitarian sector for the last fourteen years. I've been able to respond to three different drought disasters. But what we’re experiencing right now - it's a worse kind of drought than we've ever seen. We've had four years, four years of failed rainy seasons. And most of the communities that I'm representing and I'm speaking of here, they are solely dependent on agriculture and pastoralism. So you can imagine four years of no rainfall what happens. 

And I'll start off you're just giving an example of one of the women that I met in the northern part of Kenya, specifically in Turkana. Her name is Eunice. Eunice is a mother of four, and unfortunately, Eunice's sister passed and she had to take in her sister's four children. So Eunice feeds eight children in her house. Eunice together with her community, they came up with a plan of solar irrigated farms, where they could depend on actually instead of just depending on rain fed agriculture, they could also depend on the solar irrigation farms. But because of the four years of failed rainy seasons, The water tables have really gone low, and the solar pumps cannot pump any water. So they've had no harvest at all. So this means, Eunice and her eight children, they have nothing to feed, and she looks at them when I was talking to her. She was just looking at the little ones and saying, the older children had to be pulled out of school, both boys and girls to go and scavenge in the nearest towns and just look for wild foods and bring for the younger children for them to feed, so that at least they have something to eat.

In Ethiopia a woman called Tigiste. Tigiste is a young mother. She's just twenty three years old, and she has three children. And Tigiste got married at a very young age because of the issue of drought. And she thought it was just relieving stress from her family. But unfortunately, her husband has lost all the livestock that he had. He's seen his livestock die because over the years, there's been no pasture generating and he’s been travelling miles and kilometres in search of pasture. And this has also generated a lot of conflict between other tribes that are also fighting for that pasture. He's lost all his livestock. Tigiste feeds her children in turns. I'm talking about children, the eldest child is eight years old. The youngest was one year old and while I watched Tigiste breastfeeding this little boy I was really sad for him because he was so malnourished and so was she.

So the impact of this current drought, especially on women and children is really, really devastating. And communities such as Tigiste’s and Eunice’s  are experiencing it because they had put mechanisms in place to actually tackle the drought, but because of the climate change that we are actually experiencing in East Africa. We are seeing a drought that we've never seen before. So women are often responsible for feeding and also for scavenging for food for their families. And because of this stress, most of them are actually having to go long distances in search of water or in search of food. And with that, they are experiencing a lot of sexual-based violence and some of them have even gone to the extent of pulling their little girls out of school or even the girls themselves volunteering to drop out of school with the thought that if they get married, they'll actually be able to fetch some dowry that will push their family forward. So we are seeing a lot of young marriages also happening. Especially in Northern Kenya in Southern Ethiopia and Northern Uganda. And all this is because these communities are actually experiencing this worst drought.

So my prayer and plea is that we need to act today. We need to just support the humanitarian support that is actually happening. 

I'm glad to hear Vicky will be going to Ethiopia next week. So you'd be able to actually see what I'm just talking about here. And it's about time. We just started advocating more for the climate finances that we've been speaking about that we have all pledged to and targeting the local communities and local responders and most specifically, the women, the women in Africa and the women in these communities are very resilient. And if we target them rightly, they'll be able to support us through, they'll be able to pull themselves and pull their communities through this period and future in terms of what they are facing.