* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
A first-hand account of deteriorating conditions in Northern Kenya
The ongoing and devastating drought in Kenya is a forgotten crisis within a forgotten crisis. Over 3 million Kenyans are in need of humanitarian support, and malnutrition rates in large areas of the country are far above the internationally-instituted famine thresholds. In February, the UN appealed for $4.4 billion to respond to famine risk for what they refer to as "the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations". Kenya is not included in this calculation.
This is because, at least in theory, Kenya should be able to respond to the ongoing drought without the assistance of international aid agencies. In 2015, Kenya was reclassified from low income to lower-middle income status. In 2013, a new constitution started devolving decision-making and national wealth to county level, so that drought-prone counties could decide best how to allocate their response funds. The government and donors have also put effort and money into strengthening the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA).
The NDMA is rightly praised for kicking off their drought response early, several months before emergency levels hit -- heeding the warning signs available months in advance. Together with Kenya Red Cross and with funding from the UK Department for International Development (DfID), they began scaling up the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP), which preemptively gets cash into the hands hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in areas affected by drought. But that has not prevented the country from slipping into crisis. On February 10, the government declared a national disaster.
On a trip to Turkana County in northern Kenya last week, I visited a government clinic where the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has recently started providing nutrition support. Our five staff, who constitute a mobile team that will visit this clinic for one day every two weeks, were overwhelmed by the hundreds of families and malnourished infants that had been brought in for screening and treatment.
The waiting areas for the two small clinic buildings were overflowing, and hundreds more were sitting in the shade of nearby trees. The temperature was almost 100°F, and the waiting families were drinking cloudy water that they had scooped from near-empty hand-dug wells. The two government healthcare workers who normally staff this clinic would have been paralyzed by the scope of need.
Contributing to the problem, a break in the government’s therapeutic food supply pipeline means that there is no way to respond at scale to cases of moderate malnourishment. Due to a lack of funding, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has also had to suspend their successful nationwide school feeding program -- meaning children are dropping out of school, and losing precious nutrition in the process. This means that as food availability worsens -- as it’s expected to for the next three months at least -- moderately malnourished infants and children will increasingly slip into severe malnutrition. We expect that as our team cycles back to this clinic on a biweekly basis they will find growing numbers of severely malnourished infants who are weeks, or days, away from death.
We visited only one out of the 40 areas where IRC teams are responding -- and the scale is already overwhelming, and not just for the IRC. There are another 40 areas that the local government is pushing the IRC to support, and this is all in an area that covers only about one-tenth of the worst affected parts of the country. The IRC and other humanitarian agencies are struggling to raise response funds because since Kenya graduated to lower-middle income status, donors have focused their attention on support for the government.
Bilateral aid to the Kenyan government is the right approach, up to a point. Building national ability to prevent, mitigate, or respond to crisis makes good sense in a country with a strong and growing economy like Kenya’s. As we saw in Turkana, however, the practice of national institution-strengthening has not yet caught up with the theory. Given the scale of the crisis, aid organizations operating in Turkana -- and the growing expanse of Kenya’s territory in need -- will still need urgent, and immediate, financial assistance to supplement the drought response. Devolution is a process that takes time; infrastructure needs to be built and staff need to be recruited and trained. Until that happens, donors have to revise their strategy and urgently fund international aid agencies to supplement the government’s disaster response -- before it’s too late.
Conor Phillips is the International Rescue Committee's country director in Kenya, where IRC provides health care, skills training, and women’s protection services for over half of Kenya’s 600,000 refugees.
