Red Cross Blogs

Interview: how do you manage a food crisis in east Africa?

By Katrina Crew
October 10, 2011 at 2:30 pm

©Simone Novotny

We sounded the alarm in January.  There is a food security assessment that’s done every three months, with several sectors working together, and the Red Cross is on the steering group, which maps regions to see what their food situation is like. It’s a project funded by the World Bank in all arid lands, called the Arid Lands Resource Management Project. 

©Katrina Crew/British Red Cross

Unfortunately, there was a weak response. It’s quite discouraging because you see the real situation on the ground, in the communities. For example, when we say their livestock has died – livestock is everything for this community – it’s what they use to send their children to school, it’s what they sell to eat, it’s how they make money – so when we cannot cushion their livestock then the community feels let down. 

2) What would people normally eat in Turkana? Why is that a problem right now? 

They rely on milk and blood. They will milk their camels, cows and goats, and then they’ll pierce the animal in the neck and gather some blood, without killing the animal. They’ll mix them together and drink it raw or cook with it. It’s a common practice for most pastoralist communities, not just the Turkana. 

Even though they are herders, they rarely kill their animals to eat. Sometimes they will sell one or two animals and buy food, mostly maize to make ugali [a maize flour dish like polenta] with milk. Some households have chickens so they also eat eggs. 

©Simone Novotny

They value livestock a lot so they will not slaughter an animal for food. They will keep an animal until they realise the animal is dying, and then they might slaughter it for their family. Animals are their wealth, so having a lot of them is a demonstration of their wealth. In most cases, the only time they eat meat is when an organisation like the Kenya Red Cross will buy their dying animals, slaughter them, and give the meat to the family. 

The Turkana are nomads, and families used to move together. But now, the emerging trend is that men move with the livestock to find new pastures and leave the aged, women and children behind. Some of the settlements are more or less permanent. When the conditions become tough, it’s now mostly just the young men who move with livestock. 

The problem is that is that when the livestock moves away, women, children and the elderly cannot get milk or sell an animal to eat. 

3) What’s daily life like for Turkana people? 

Women gather water. They milk animals. They construct shelter. They prepare food. Men only look after livestock and provide security. 

Turkana people live in a manyatta – a dwelling constructed by women of acacia trees and, depending on the area, palm trees. They use locally available materials. It takes up to a week to build. 

©Katrina Crew/British Red Cross

When they move, they pack all their housing materials on donkeys and take them with them. As long as there is pasture and water for livestock, they’ll stay there. Once that’s depleted, they move. 

In most areas, they find boreholes so they’ll always have water unless the borehole breaks down – but they have to walk a long, long way to get it. Sometimes they walk for hours to gather water. 

They know the locations of all the boreholes, many of which the Kenya Red Cross constructed during the 2006 drought with funding from the European Commission – Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection (ECHO). 

4) How’s the Kenya Red Cross helping people survive the food crisis in Turkana? 

There are three Kenya Red Cross operations centres in Turkana, working across the region. Right now our focus in Turkana is on three things: 

©Simone Novotny

1) School feeding: we bring a nutritious corn/soy blend porridge called Unimix to early childhood development centres (three-to-five year olds, though many mothers bring children who are much younger than three) and to early primary schools (six-to-nine year olds). 

We are giving Unimix to 275 schools (at least 77,000 children) in Turkana. We target schools to reduce dropout rates. When we started doing school feedings in May, enrolment went up. For most kids, it’s the only meal they eat all day. Several metric tonnes of the Unimix came from funding through the British Red Cross East Africa Food Crisis Appeal. 

2) Nutritional interventions: A joint UNICEF/government survey in May showed that North Turkana had the highest malnutrition rate in the country – 37.4 per cent of children under five were malnourished (9.4 per cent of them were severely malnourished). The World Health Organisation threshold for an emergency is 15 per cent. 

©Katrina Crew/British Red Cross

The worst affected are children under five, pregnant and lactating mothers, and the elderly, so we’re focusing on them and providing a range of nutritional interventions depending on the severity of the case. 

The moderately malnourished, and pregnant and lactating women are put on the supplementary feeding programme, and their progress is monitored every two weeks. The severely malnourished are managed through outpatient therapeutic care and are also monitored regularly. 

©Katrina Crew/British Red Cross

Those who show marked improvement (based on mid-upper arm circumference) are discharged from outpatient therapy to supplementary feeding. Those who improve from the supplementary feeding programme are linked to the general food aid provided by the government and the World Food Programme. 

3) Improving access to water and sanitation, to help communities become more resilient to droughts in the future. 

Food isn’t grown in Turkana, but in some places the soil has the potential for crop production. The Red Cross is looking at some rivers in Turkana Central to see how we can do irrigation on a medium scale. 

We’ve given a lot of greenhouses to schools and we’re looking at how they can produce their own vegetables – tomatoes, for example. When students see how you can grow crops and get food from this soil, you’re also transforming their minds.  

5) What does the future look like for Turkana? 

In the next few weeks, we’ll do another food security prediction for the last three months of 2011. If we see that the rains will fail again, we will have a very serious problem because the drought will continue into 2012 and affect people who are already very weak. 

But the Red Cross will be here throughout the emergency – even if it continues into 2012. 

Donate to the East Africa Food Crisis Appeal

Tags: Africa, drought, East Africa, food crisis, food insecurity, Kenya

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