Announcement

Drought Conditions Persist as Kenyans Hope for Rains

 | Tuesday, October 13, 2009

 

A USAID/EA Food For Peace (FFP) and USAID/Kenya team visited Kenya’s southeast and coastal areas most affected by the current drought in late August.  The visit confirmed recent findings from the Kenya Food Security Group’s Long Rains Assessment of deteriorating conditions due to poor rains throughout the pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and marginal agricultural areas of the country.

The USAID team noted consecutive poor rainy seasons in virtually all areas visited; a severe lack of food access, if not availability, within communities; increases in trekking distances to fetch water for both livestock and domestic consumption; and significantly worsening terms of trade for bartering livestock for grain.   These conditions have led to varying degrees of stretched coping mechanisms among populations, and some increases in malnutrition rates. Food security conditions are expected to deteriorate further in these agro-pastoral and marginal agricultural areas at least until the short rains harvest (assuming it rains) in December. 

According to the interagency Long Rains Assessment report, approximately 3.8 million pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, and marginal agriculture households in Kenya require urgent humanitarian assistance as a result of successive droughts throughout much of the country, up from 2.6 million per the February/March 2009 short rains   assessment. 

To respond to the humanitarian situation in Kenya, the U.S. Government ’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has provided $24 million for Fiscal Year (FY) 2009; FFP has provided food aid valued at $87 million in FY 2009 and an early FY 2010 contribution of $25 million to the World Food Program.  To date in FY 2009 USAID’s Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Bureau has provided more funding for Kenya’s emergency situation than in any of the past ten years.