ONE Web Developer Tsegaye Hidru urges ONE members to give the gift of their voice to those in need for Ethiopian New Year.
I don’t know if you know this, but today is Ethiopian New Year — an important holiday in my culture that holds a deep meaning for me. It’s a day when Christian Ethiopians come together and celebrate the first day of the Julian calendar with food and coffee ceremony, music, arts and crafts, and gift-giving.
My family in Ethiopia will probably spend this special day eating food and getting together with relatives and neighbors. And for me, I’ll be celebrating it here in the States with my friends. While I am grateful that my family and I can afford to do this, this is not the case for all Ethiopians. There are a lot of people in my country who are not able to celebrate in the same way because of famine and high food prices engulfing the Horn of Africa.
It’s over a month since famine was declared in Somalia and alarm bells clearly rung about serious food shortages across Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are in desperate need of food, clean water and basic sanitation and we are all asking: how can this be happening again? In this past month we have seen differing responses locally, regionally and globally to the crisis. Already there are lessons we must learn about how to stop famine happening again.
As Richard Dowden noted previously on this blog there are many political factors that complicate the situation in Somalia. Any lasting solution will require a regional roadmap out of the Somali cycle of failed statism. Eritrea and others must be brought around a table with other regional governments, and representatives from wide cross section of Somali civil society. Maybe this famine will reenergise the too often stalled process. However politics is not the only factor here and there are other lessons to learn.
Nora Coghlan reports live from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Nefisa used to struggle to feed her family in July and August, two of the driest months in the highlands of Ethiopia’s Oramia region. They were usually able to borrow from neighbours, but Nefisa says her five children were often sick. Their farmland dry, she and her husband would travel from town to town looking for day labour.
July and August are still difficult for Nefisa and her family, but thanks to Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (known as the PSNP) they have now have a reliable supply of food during the months that used to be known as the “food gap.”
Ethiopia launched the PSNP in 2005 to help “chronically food insecure” people build resilience to the country’s recurring drought.
Each month for six months, families like Nefisa’s now receive either food transfers (15kg of wheat per person) or cash. This extra support means that those families don’t have to sell assets like livestock to make it through the dry months.
Profiling the lives of farmers from Mexico, Ethiopia and Bangladesh, “Challenging Hunger,” a new documentary by Bread for the World and ViewChange, gives some much-needed attention to the 1 billion people across the globe who are affected by food insecurity.
By now, you’ve probably heard the alarming statistics that hunger is the world’s No. 1 health risk, and that approximately one in seven people go to bed hungry each night. But, understanding what these numbers really mean for the individuals affected by food insecurity can be difficult to conceptualize.
That’s why “Challenging Hunger” is important to watch. It exposes the challenges of real-life farmers on the ground who have dealt with infertile land, unsteady incomes and drought. But it also highlights the innovative solutions that are helping make a “world that can feed itself.” From aid groups to entrepreneurs, there are sustainable solutions that can help end food insecurity.
Watch the full length documentary in the player above. And let us know what you think in the comments below.
Low vaccine coverage, poor sanitation, overcrowding, extensive population movements, inadequate health care systems, famine and despair…of all these things, malnutrition holds the spotlight as the most pressing health issue surrounding the famine in the Horn of Africa.
According to UN refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards, one in every two children below the age of five arriving at the Dollo Ado refugee camp in Southeast Ethiopia is malnourished. But the refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia may not be able to provide adequate care and treatment for these children. In some cases, the camps may make refugees’ health worse, exposing them to diseases like cholera and measles. Why? Because the degenerating conditions in these congested refugee camps are a recipe for infectious disease disaster.
As we learn more about the Horn of Africa crisis, it’s clear that world hunger is a much larger issue than most people realize. To help illustrate this notion, Benjamin D. Henning, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, used data from the Poverty Mapping Project at Columbia University to create this unsettling map of hungry children across the globe. Take a look:
The map illustrates the estimated total number of underweight children under the age of five living in that area. As you can see, the problem of undernourished children is just as pressing in South and Southeast Asia. Take a look at some of Benjamin’s other maps on his blog, Views of the World.
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