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Across the Horn of Africa, severe ongoing drought is reshaping the lives of millions as the lack of water destroys livelihoods, causes mass migration, and is the reason for increasing malnutrition. Read how the Somali Red Crescent is working to help where it is most needed. 

In East Africa, tens of millions of people are in dire need of food as a series of disasters from climate change, conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, a locust invasion, and longstanding vulnerabilities have converged into a humanitarian crisis. Time is running out to avert starvation. Unless urgent action is taken, the continued drought in East Africa could come to resemble the one in 2011, which killed about 260,000 people in Somalia.

Nearly one year ago, my colleague Martin De Vries described the first rains of 2017 to fall on the desperately drought-affected district of Kindo Koysha in southern Ethiopia. The occasion was joyous but all too short-lived. As Martin concluded then: “Has the drought ended? Not by a long way.” I arrived in Ethiopia three months later to find incredibly resilient people coping with varying degrees of recurrent drought in their regular ways; ways unfathomable to most of us in Canada.

In 2018, the food insecurity crisis that is impacting millions of people in parts of Africa is expected to continue. Learn what is happening, who is being affected, and what is being done to help. 

One of the greatest risks for the people affected by drought in southern Ethiopia is the loss of their livestock; their livelihoods. 

In drought-stricken Ethiopia, the Canadian Red Cross is supporting the Ethiopian Red Cross Society in delivering immediate life-saving help, including safer drinking water (via water trucking and water purification), hygiene promotion and supplies, and supplementary feed for livestock.

Bashiir sits upright on his cot inside a crowded cholera ward. “It is the first time I am sitting like this in a long time,” says Bashiir. “With my illness, I could not sit, I could not stand. For three days and three nights, I was vomiting. My entire body was aching. Those were black days.”
 Bashiir is at a treatment centre in eastern Africa for acute watery diarrhea/cholera set up by the Canadian Red Cross, with support from the Government of Canada.

Combatting acute watery diarrhea/cholera requires knowledge, skill, equipment, medicine, and most importantly: good, clean water. But how can that be accomplished when an increase in cases of acute watery diarrhea/cholera is seen in a developing country experiencing a severe drought?