For teenagers like 16-year-old Hannah, who lives in a dusty village on the border of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, the drought that is ravaging the area and the deadly shockwaves it is sending out are too real to endure .
It hasn’t rained in her area for three seasons, and children who should be safe at home or at school are walking for miles in search of water. It’s not just about the immediate pangs of thirst and hunger, but also that mothers have to check at night whether their malnourished children are still breathing or whether children have to travel long distances to fetch water from snake-infested wells.
The drought is tearing apart all aspects of life in the region, tearing apart an already fragile safety net for countless children and their families. This rainless season follows difficult years: another drought between 2017 and 2018 and a locust plague in 2019. The socio-economic impact and the impact of Covid-19 have also exacerbated the situation.
Confrontation with hunger, child marriage, or both
On my last visit to East Africa, I met Hannah, a hardworking teenager who dreams of becoming a doctor. But the lack of rain causes her parents’ livestock to die. This in turn means that they cannot pay their school fees or provide for their family’s basic needs such as food.
Hannah fears she will be forced into marriage if she is taken out of school in hopes that a husband can afford to feed her better than her parents. Unfortunately one research discovered by World Vision in 2021 that it is a perverted loop: Hungry girls and boys are 60% more likely to be forced into marriage than their non-hungry peers, and married people are 60% more likely to go to bed hungry. As I listened to Hannah’s father talk about the seemingly insurmountable problems he faces, he challenged me, “What would you do in this situation?”
This conversation keeps me awake at night as parents are forced to experience devastating situations through no fault of their own, situations that no one should experience. And as a father of two, I don’t know the answer.
What I do know is that our staff, some of whom come from the communities they serve and who understand these nuances better than I ever will, are doing what we can to end hunger and provide much-needed hope. Employees like Everlin, who works in Marsabit in northern Kenya, where he is World Vision’s child protection officer. She also grew up in a village in the north. She often went hungry and received food aid herself. She was about to be subjected to female genital mutilation and early marriage, but a missionary intervened. Now, as I’ve seen, she’s helping other girls like her to defend their rights.
People are literally starving.
Humanitarian organizations appreciate that One person starves to death every four seconds. The UN began tracking food prices nearly two decades ago, and in recent months has According to World Bank data, hunger has risen to its highest level ever.
While access to food used to be poor, the war in Ukraine has made the situation even worse: the number of people living in catastrophic starvation conditions is four times as high today as it was 15 months ago. The conflict’s impact on grain, fertilizer and fuel markets has pushed up the prices of food, raw materials and transportation around the world cut rations for refugees and displaced persons. Residents of low-income countries that rely on these exports have been hit hardest, it was announced last June World Food Program. Although food prices have fallen slightly since July, they are still at all-time highs and the recent calm does not appear to be affecting people’s pockets.
Even before the war, hunger had increased dramatically around the world due to the Covid-19 lockdowns, intensified conflicts in many countries and the effects of climate change. In 2021, 1.5 times more people were at risk of famine than in 2019, before the pandemic, the World Health Organization reports.
In drought-stricken northern Kenya, I saw cattle carcasses littering the landscape and desperate pastoral families dividing their meager amounts of food between their children and their last animals. Faced with impossible choices, many food aid organizations have no choice but to reduce the quantity, quality and frequency of food aid given because there just isn’t enough. Despite record levels of humanitarian funding, needs are outstripping support and I fear that unless this funding gap is filled, we will not be able to feed millions of starving children and their families.
The challenge is great, but we know that if we act now, we can avoid this crisis. We just need the will to do it. After all, the response to Ukraine was a model of solidarity, with 66% of total needs already funded, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It will be a moral failure if we don’t make the same commitment to feeding millions of the world’s most vulnerable people and to preventing girls like Hannah from being expelled from school and forced into child marriage.
Andrew Morley He is President and CEO of World Vision International.
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