Mr Tsitso Mohalake is 62 years old and lives in a remote farming village in north-eastern Lesotho. He and his wife care for their two children (one who is in school and one who is looking for work) as well as their three grandchildren whose young parents passed away following long illnesses. Due to poor rainfall last season, Mr Mohalake only managed to harvest enough to feed the family for a month and a half. Of his original five cattle, four have been stolen and the fifth has died.
With no plough animals, no milk for his grandchildren, no food, and being unable to migrate for work as many young people are doing, Mr Meholake started looking for work in his neighbourhood but jobs were in short supply. Eventually he was hired to offload sacks of grain for a local merchant and was paid R200 (about $23 US). Thanks to this hard-earned pay, his family now has two meals a day for the next month and a half. However, because there is not enough money to buy vegetables, the family’s diet of maize can only be supplemented with wild vegetables.
Mr Mohalake told us that he borrowed seeds from relatives and hired a sharecropper on credit to plant some of his farming plots. He will have to pay the sharecropper a significant sum, and is now deeply in debt. Unless he is able to find income from another source, his family faces severe food insecurity until the next harvest in May.
Mr Mohalake has heard that humanitarian assistance is coming to help vulnerable communities like his, but so far he has not received any support and said he’s not sure that his family will receive assistance because in his opinion there are families in the area whose needs are even more urgent. But without humanitarian assistance he doesn’t know how he will be able to feed his family until next harvest, and worries especially about his grandchildren.
Lesotho is a very small country, and media and humanitarian attention has been slow to arrive - perhaps in part due to the focus on high-profile crises in the Horn of Africa and across the Sahel. While these large crises require a great deal of attention, there is a risk that countries like Lesotho and families like Mohalake’s may be overlooked.
CARE has been one of the first agencies to begin responding to this crisis, beginning with the distribution of seeds to vulnerable families so that they are able to plant in the current agricultural season. This is vital as unless farmers have the support they need to plant next year’s harvest, the emergency is likely to deepen and affect an even larger population. In addition to seed distributions, over the coming months CARE plans to deliver a combination of cash vouchers and cash-for-work programmes to enable people to buy food in the market.
In addition to an immediate response though, long-term assistance for recovery and future resilience is also vital. Even when the next harvest season arrives, Mr Mohalake will have to spend a significant portion of his income paying his debts from this crisis, and it will take time to rebuild investments and safety nets such as his cattle and other assets. For this reason, CARE works to connect its emergency response existing long-term CARE programming in Lesotho, which includes efforts to improve agricultural production, irrigation projects, community gardens and vegetable cultivation, and other programs such as Village Savings and Loans Associations.