By Jefferson Kahinju and Thomas Mukoya
Turkana, Kenya — Four years after a severe drought devastated northern Kenya, failed rains are once again causing starvation while aid cuts force agencies to scale back their efforts and feed fewer people.
On the barren plains of Turkana county, 76-year-old widowed grandmother Echakan Amaja sits outside her mud hut in Loperot village, surviving on foraged gingerbread fruit and the scant aid rations she can get her hands on.
The family’s difficulties have mounted after her son was killed a fortnight ago in a cattle rustling raid while herding animals. All their livestock was stolen in the raid.
“When my livestock were stolen by bandits, all my grandchildren came back home,” Amaja said. She now has the responsibility for feeding her five daughters and seven grandchildren.
The family struggles to get by on foraged fruit, and the roughly 43.2kg of food rations and 3.2l of oil they get each month from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).
Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority said in December last year that more than nine counties — mostly in the north and the east — were facing emerging drought conditions that could severely affect food security, water access and pasture availability.
Resource conflict
The agency has also warned that recurrent droughts were increasing competition for scarce resources and raising the risk of violent conflict as the crisis spreads to areas that have not previously faced dry conditions.
Sarah Ayodi, the head of WFP’s field office in Turkana, said 333,000 people in the county required food aid,though the agency would not be able to support them after March.
In August last year, Save the Children reported that at least four African countries, including Kenya, would run out of specialised life-saving food for severely malnourished children as a result of shortages caused by aid cuts.Under President Donald Trump, the US has slashed humanitarian assistance, and other Western powers have also been cutting funding as part of longer-term reductions.
Unprecedented drought
Some families in Turkana say that even the wild fruits, which have traditionally helped them through lean periods, are disappearing or shrivelling due to drought. Asinyen Akol, 81, described the current dry spell as unprecedented in her lifetime.
“This year ... is the worst drought I have ever experienced. You can’t survive here because of drought ... even trees and wild fruits are nowhere to be seen, not even a green leaf,” Akol said.
The drought has also left a trail of loss in Kenya, with cattle carcasses littering landscapes inhabited by pastoralists.
The crisis has also hit other countries in the Horn of Africa: Somalia declared a national drought emergency in November after recurrent seasons of poor rainfall.
The WFP warned last month that millions of Somalis were grappling with severe hunger, with almost half of all children malnourished and in need of urgent treatment.
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