US pledges more funding for drought relief

The United States will provide an additional US $25 million in humanitarian aid to Ethiopia to alleviate the effects of prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa country. Michael Hess, assistant administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said on Thursday that the additional funding - which will be channelled through the United Nations World Food Programme and the international charity Save the Children - included $17 million in food aid and $8.3 million in non-food aid. "This is in addition to more than $31 million in emergency humanitarian food and non-food assistance already provided to Ethiopia by the US government since October 2005," Hess said after touring drought-stricken parts of the country. "This increase in funding will mitigate the effects of the crises in the Horn of Africa. We urge other donor governments to act quickly to help alleviate the current suffering and to help prevent a human catastrophe." The new funding would be directed mainly to nomadic pastoral communities that have lost most of their livestock due to lack of pasture and water. "We want to see an all-round activity to improve the life of the pastoralists," said Hess. Earlier this month, the Ethiopian government and humanitarian organisations expressed concern over slow donor response to the drought crisis, saying nutrition and water needs were severely underfunded. In January, the government, the UN and other aid agencies had appealed for $166 million in emergency food and non-food assistance in Ethiopia. According to the UN, at least 1.7 million Ethiopians are struggling to survive, with limited access to water in the eastern Somali region and in the southern Borena zone. About one in five children in southeastern Ethiopia is malnourished, and two out of every 10,000 die every day, making the need for therapeutic feeding and water access extremely urgent, according to Paul Hebert, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia.