By FRED OLUOCH Special Correspondent
Posted Saturday, April 20 2013 at 18:38
In Summary
- At a conference convened by the Rockeffeller Foundation in Nairobi, experts on humanitarian aid were in agreement that governments in the region have not been responding to early warning systems on drought because political risks take precedence over early intervention.
Kenya has set up an agency to deal with drought in order to avert a recurrence of the famine that hit the country in 2011, even as experts call for a regional approach to develop early warning systems and act on them.
At a conference convened by the Rockeffeller Foundation in Nairobi, experts on humanitarian aid were in agreement that governments in the region have not been responding to early warning systems on drought because political risks take precedence over early intervention.
James Oduor, the chief executive of the newly created National Drought Management Agency, said that his agency has been set up to streamline drought management and response because previously there were too many centres of power that confused even the donors who wanted to provide support.
Citizen’s campaign
The 2011 drought affected 12 million people in the Horn, especially in North Eastern Province, Kenya, Somalia, southern Ethiopia and South Sudan. It took the launch of the “Kenyans for Kenya” fundraising campaign by citizens to make the government accept that there was famine.
Mr Oduor said that the country and the region should look beyond administrative boundaries when dealing with drought and famine to not only allow the flow of food from areas of plenty to those of scarcity, but to allow pastoralists to move their livestock across borders for water and pasture in case one country is affected by drought.
“Free movement can save the cattle from even the severest drought. Unfortunately, we don’t even share information on which areas are in plenty and which ones are in scarcity,” said Mr Oduor.