Due to the severe food crisis in the Horn of Africa, Senior World Vision
officials attended a joint UN and NGO appeal on Friday, launched by Jan Egeland,
the United Nationals Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
April 11, 2006
Due to the severe food crisis in the Horn of Africa, Senior
World Vision officials attended a joint UN and NGO appeal on Friday, launched by
Jan Egeland, the United Nationals Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian
Affairs. The appeal calls for $426 million in response to the drought in the
Horn of Africa.
“The Horn of Africa is one of the most food insecure
regions in the world with more than 40 per cent of people undernourished. At
present millions of people are threatened with starvation following the recent
severe drought,” stated Egeland.
During the appeal, Wilfred Mlay, World
Vision’s Vice-President for Africa Region, Philippe Guiton, Humanitarian and
Emergency Affairs Director for Africa and Ian Ridley, Associate Director of the
Global Rapid Response Team met with donors and UN officials.
Guiton said
he’s pleased the UN is urging donors to respond now to prevent what is now
called an “emergency” from becoming a full-scale famine.
“Jan Egeland was very clear. By acting now and pre-positioning
food before the coming months when the situation is expected to become much
worse, we can have a better impact than just sitting and waiting,” said Guiton.
Currently, around 15 million are at risk of starvation in the Horn of
Africa, more than 8 million of them being in need of urgent assistance. As an
indicator of the seriousness of the crisis, a number of high level government
officials including the Prime Minister of Somalia and high level representatives
of the Kenya government also attended the UN appeal.
For weeks, World
Vision has already been responding proactively to the crisis through its
programmes in five countries—Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi and Tanzania,
where in the past two weeks, the charity completed a round of food distributions
to more than 22,000 people in Moyale District in Kenya’s northern
region.
In the worst hit areas, World Vision is providing food aid in
partnership with the World Food Programme, supplementary feeding, disaster
mitigation initiatives, conflict resolution, water and sanitation and non-food
items among other interventions.
World Vision’s offices in Kenya,
Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi and Tanzania, in partnership with World Vision’s
Humanitarian and Emergency Affairs team are
working to monitor and protect
the communities they serve and in particular, sponsored children.
Guiton
said it’s far more cost effective for humanitarian actors to mobilize funds and
resources now rather than waiting to gauge whether the rains come because the
cost of delivering relief increases exponentially the longer it takes to
respond.
The cost per day of feeding children now is much lower than it
will cost if those same children fall into severe malnutrition and require
supplementary feeding as well as medical care to save their lives, he added.
“In southern Africa, we managed to avoid a crisis degenerating into a
famine because we intervened early enough. World Vision has learned from this
and we want to ensure we can also prevent a famine in East Africa,” said
Guiton.
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