A matter of life and death for 40,000 children - Unicef

An estimated 40,000 children in the Horn of Africa risk dying of malnutrition in the coming months, the result of prolonged regional drought, which has given way to torrential rains, said the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) on Monday.

Unicef appealed for US $80 million earlier this year, of which it received less than half. The agency has called on the international community to make up for the funding shortfall of $54 million to respond to the crisis.

"This drought has killed up to half the animal population of pastoralists in the Horn of Africa," said Rima Salah, Unicef's deputy executive director, when she launched an appeal in Geneva. "Rain doesn’t bring that back. A pastoralist without a herd is like a farmer without seeds - no longer a pastoralist, just a human being struggling to find food, clean water, shelter and a way to earn money to keep his children alive."

Torrential rainfall had compounded the crisis in some areas by killing livestock, bringing malaria and other diseases, washing away young crops, and polluting scarce water sources. The region's 16 million nomadic pastoralists, who live in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, have been most severely affected by the drought. About half of them need humanitarian assistance, including 1.6 million children under age five.

"Food shortage has always been a fact of life in this tough region," said Salah. "But to help them ride out the regular crises, we need to think like pastoralists, rather than insisting that they adapt to the fixed-location services usually offered to them. If people can live and raise cattle in desert zones in the other parts of the world, they can do so in the Horn. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years."

Unicef, other UN agencies and partners in the region have already begun adapting programmes better suited to the pastoral way of life, the agency said. It gave the example of mobile therapeutic feeding centres for young children and the funding and training of teachers who can travel with families as they move throughout the region in search of water and food for their herds.