Drought in the Horn of Africa.
Panos Pictures/Dieter Telemans
‘Too much emphasis was placed on national-level availability of food, too little on local variations and on the crucial questionof people’s access to food.’
- Cash Transfers
Launch & Discussion of the Joint Special Issues of Development Policy Review & Disasters, September 2006. PDF >
- Responses to the drought in the Greater Horn of Africa
Events held in Nairobi and London, May 2006.
The meetings focused on early warning and assessments; humanitarian responses; funding mechanisms; regional perspectives; and understanding pastoral livelihoods. More >
- Cash and emergency relief
London, January 2006. The conference aimed to provide a forum to raise awareness within the humanitarian system of the growing body of experience with cash responses as well as an opportunity for debate at a senior policy level about when and where cash responses are likely to be appropriate. More >
Briefing Papers and Notes
- Providing aid in insecure environments: Trends in policy and operations
HPG Report, by Abby Stoddard, Adele Harmer and Katherine Haver, September 2006.
PDF > (also as a briefing paper).
- Livelihoods, migration and remittance flows in times of crisis and conflict: case-studies from Darfur , Sudan
HPG Background Paper, by Helen Young, September 2006. PDF >
- Seed vouchers in emergency programming: lessons from Ethiopia and Mozambique
HPG Background paper, by Catherine Longley, September 2006. PDF >
- Saving lives through livelihoods: Critical gaps in the response to the drought in the Greater Horn of Africa
HPG Briefing Note , May 2006. PDF >
- Humanitarian issues in Niger
HPG Briefing Note , August 2005. PDF >
- Aftershocks: natural disaster risk and economic development policy
ODI Briefing Paper, November 2005. PDF >
Research Reports
- South Asia Earthquake 2005: Learning from Previous Recovery Operations
ALNAP-ProVention, paper two, December 2005. PDF >
- Lessons Learned: South Asia Earthquake 2005: Learning from Previous Earthquakes
ALNAP-ProVention, paper one, November 2005. PDF >
- Dependency and humanitarian relief: A critical analysis
HPG Report, by Paul Harvey and Jeremy Lind, July 2005. PDF >
- Cash and vouchers in emergencies
HPG Background Paper, by Paul Harvey, February 2005. PDF >
Opinions
- Cash Transfers: Just giving them the money?
ODI Opinions by John Farrington, Paul Harvey and Rachel Slater, September 2005. PDF >
- UN Reform: An eight step programme for more effective collective action
ODI Opinions by Simon Maxwell, September 2005. PDF >
- The Niger Food Crisis: How has this happened? What should be done to prevent a recurrence?
ODI Opinions by Edward Clay, September 2005. PDF >
By James Darcy, Director of Programmes, Humanitarian Policy Group
While much of the world’s attention has been on dramatic rapid-onset natural disasters in the past year — such as the earthquake in Kashmir — two deadly but more insidious disasters hit sub-Saharan Africa. The crop failure in Niger and the Sahel in the first half of 2005, and the more recent drought in the Greater Horn of Africa (Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti), each claimed many lives and left many more weakened and destitute. In both cases, national governments and the international community showed themselves unable to intervene effectively to prevent the emergence of a full-blown crisis. While in the Sahel case, this can be laid partly at the door of early warning failures, no such excuse can be made in the Horn of Africa, where the crisis was well signalled in advance.
The sub-Saharan crises were both triggered by rain failures, part of a recurrent pattern of climatic variation that is predictable both in its occurrence and its effects. Yet for a variety of reasons, the aid response in each case was slow and insufficient. The responses, when they did come, have in many cases been inappropriate in kind and scale. In the Horn of Africa in particular, no concerted attempt was made to shore up the livelihoods of pastoralists and to protect their livestock — with direct humanitarian consequences for their ability to feed their families and to ensure their basic subsistence. Given the wealth of accumulated knowledge on drought and its effects in the regions, and the existence of drought planning and response mechanisms, this seems unaccountable and inexcusable. What explains it?
In the case of Niger and the Sahel, there were failings in both the early warning systems and in the way that early warning analysis was interpreted. As in previous droughts, too much emphasis was placed on national-level availability of food, too little on local variations and on the crucial question of people’s access to food. In the worst affected districts, people’s ability to purchase food collapsed, with grain prices rising and livestock prices plummeting. As Amartya Sen pointed out more than 20 years ago, people may starve even where food is available in the market if they do not have the means to buy it. In Niger and elsewhere, politics and ideology play a part. A dominant consensus against the use of food aid, coupled with a concern not to distort the market or create dependency amongst recipients of relief, contributed to critical delays in the relief response in Niger. Here and in the Horn of Africa, livelihood support options were pursued on far too small a scale, and the use of alternatives like cash transfers was probably under-utilised. Two main factors appear to be at work here. One is the politics of famine: national governments in particular are notoriously unwilling to admit the existence of famine or food crisis until the evidence is overwhelming – at which point it is too late to avert the crisis. The second concerns the aid industry, stuck in a relief-development paradigm that divides the world into ‘crisis’ and ‘normal’ states, and constructs its programme responses and funding mechanisms accordingly. The reality of people’s lives in such contexts is more complex, and effective prevention of crisis requires forms of intervention that may fit neither relief nor development models. Unless this crude binary view of the world is abandoned, responses will continue to be hampered and many will needlessly suffer as a result.
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