Life-saving lessons from the Horn of Africa

There were strong and clear warnings for the food security crisis in the Horn of Africa as early as November 2010 yet not nearly enough was done till after the rains failed in May 2011.  By the time the humanitarian response really geared up — July-September — many people had gone into debt, many had lost their livelihoods, some irretrievably, many were suffering extreme hardship, particularly women and children, and some were losing their lives.  This failure is not new — it follows the patterns of previous droughts.  This represents a systemic failure and one that must be tackled by the humanitarian community both for moral and financial reasons.

The Forecasts

The drought and famine in the Horn this year has been no sudden onset crisis. Thanks to established early warning systems —such as FEWSNET (Famine Early Warning System Network) — there were clear indications of the impending drought and its possible impacts on food security.

August 2010 — FEWSNET confirmed La Nina conditions and forecast the crisis.

November 2010 — FEWSNET predictions became more strident and the October to December short rains were forecast to be extremely poor. 

December 2010 — the regional Food Security and Nutrition Working Group stated that ‘pre-emptive action is needed to protect livelihoods and avoid later costly lifesaving emergency interventions;’ the Humanitarian Community should ‘be prepared NOW at country level.

March 2011 — a joint statement from six different agencies found the situation in March alarming and predicted a major crisis if the March-May rains were as poor as expected; even average rains would lead to a critical food security situation until May/June.  The spectre of ‘localised famine conditions’in Somalia loomed for the first time. 

The Response

The international humanitarian comm-unity did not respond at scale until after the rains had failed at the end of May.  Whilst donor representatives in the region were aware of the impending crisis — for example, major donors in Kenya (ECHO, DFID and USAID) met in December 2010 to co-ordinate their future work — they were not able to access funding at scale from headquarters until media attention occurred, around June-July.

In Somalia, the situation was significantly worsened by the conflict which distracted attention from the crisis and prevented access to vulnerable populations. A lack of funding constrained most humanitarian agencies; many, including Oxfam, started to respond from December, but at a relatively small scale.

Why was the response late?

Whilst there are particular factors that may have delayed this particular response, the reality is that humanitarian responses to droughts are typically late — as they were in the Sahel in 2005 and 2010, and in Kenya in 2005/6 and 2008/9.  

Part of the problem is funding. The humanitarian system is locked in a vicious circle: major humanitarian response depends on funding, which depend on media attention, which depends on graphic proof of suffering.  

But this misses the point. We should not be relying on a humanitarian system to respond to situations of chronic vulnerability and recurrent drought. Drought is endemic in the Horn — there has been drought somewhere in the Horn of Africa in eight of the past ten years, affecting cumulatively 67 million people. The frequency of the droughts and the high levels of vulnerability mean that a response which is primarily humanitarian is not the most effective.  This does keep people alive, but it does little to sustain or protect livelihoods and reduce poverty.

The case for early response is threefold:

The moral case.  Lives, livelihoods and dignity are lost without early action.  There are higher impacts on women, who bear the physical and emotional burden of feeding their family and often eat last and least.  And temporary malnutrition shocks can have permanent impacts on children’s development thus reducing their human and financial potential.  

The financial case.  Early action is much more cost-effective. As an emergency progresses, unit costs per beneficiary increase sharply as more expensive, processed commodities become increasingly needed for therapeutic feeding, faster transport, including airlift, is required, and populations migrate to camps where broader support costs (shelter, water, medical care) become essential.  

Principles. Whilst it is clear that national governments have the primary duty of care for provision of food security for their populations, humanitarian donors are responsible through the Principles of Good Humanitarian Donorship which commit donors to ‘prevent and strengthen preparedness’ for disasters.

Long-term strategies

National governments must develop appropriate policies and invest significantly in order to address the underlying causes that make people more vulnerable to disasters — for example, land use policies (to ensure that pastoralists have access to pasture and water), investment in markets and financial services (to support the growing livestock trade), education and health etc.  

And donors must support long-term approaches which incorporate both development and emergency elements to deal with both the acute/transitory food crisis phase whilst also addressing the chronic aspects.  

One practical tool that can be used for this is Drought Cycle Management; this ensures that planning is undertaken in four scenarios — normal, alert/alarm, emergency and recovery — and provokes a different suite of interventions in each phase.  Thus flexibility is built into programme planning, and interventions adapt as the situation descends into drought.  

A recent report on the Sahel (Sahel Working Group: ‘Escaping the Hunger Cycle: Pathways to Resilience in the Sahel’) evaluates the responses to the food crises in 2005 and 2010 and makes clear that preventing food crises in the Sahel requires investing in building the resilience of people, through long-term programmes and approaches such as disaster risk reduction, social protection, food reserves and investment in smallholder agriculture.  

Longer term, more flexible funding could also replace humanitarian projects which are undertaken every year. For example, the Kenyan Red Cross connected the village of Takaba in Mandera District, North-East Kenya, to a borehole 13km away; this meant that they no longer required very expensive water trucking in the recent drought.  Shifting to long-term solutions rather than quick in and out emergency interventions is much more cost effective in the long run.  

In order to make this happen, donors must adapt their funding streams.  Development funding protocols are typically very detailed and inflexible, and often take months to change.  This is good for accountability but hinders flexibility and restricts attempts to adapt to a changing situation. It is barely viable in a situation like the Horn.  

However, there are some good examples — USAID’s ‘crisis modifier’ in Ethiopia allows the programme to switch gears into a more humanitarian mode as the situation changes.  More work is required by the UK government to make its development programmes more flexible and the process of adapting programmes less burdensome.  

Early warning action

Early warning systems are becoming more sophisticated and predictions are becoming more reliable.  The systems analyse weather, agriculture, livestock, markets and nutrition and use a range of methods such as remote sensing, modelling, field observations, assessments, surveys, often compared with baseline livelihoods analysis, to determine impact.  There is a wealth of different information, produced regularly, in detail and made accessible.  

This information must be used to stimulate a response both in scaling up long-term programming and pre-emptive humanitarian work.  

Yet there is a major block.  All actors — governments, the UN, donors, implementing agencies including Oxfam — want to be certain about the scope and depth of a looming food crisis before responding.  There might be concerns of getting it wrong — with financial and reputational risk at stake.  And in a context of chronic food insecurity, it can be difficult to distinguish the symptoms of chronic destitution from those of a critically unstable situation. But waiting for certainty before responding transfers the risks and consequences of inaction to vulnerable people.

There must be a commitment to respond at some level on the basis of a clear early warning of a crisis — otherwise these expensive and highly sophisticated early-warning systems are virtually futile.  The humanitarian system does not seem to incorporate conventional risk management — whereby the probability that a risk will occur is analysed along with its impact.  If this had been done, it would have been clear from December 2010/January 2011 that the high probability of poor March-May rains, coupled with its expected impact would constitute a critical risk which should be immediately addressed.  

Of course, forecasts can be wrong, but it must be accepted that responding appropriately to forecast risk is ultimately better risk management than the current approach of ‘wait and see and hope the rains will come.’ The efficacy of prevention is well accepted in some fields — such as vaccination programmes — but donors seem less willing to fund disaster prevention and early response.  Funding for disaster risk reduction represents only 0.5 per cent of international aid.

Donors must change their approach from requiring certainty and hard data in order to shift resources, and also reduce start-up times for humanitarian response through swift funding processes.  Whilst DfID has recently announced a Rapid Response Facility designed to enable funding in the first few days after a quick onset emergency, there is no specific funding facility for early response to an impending crisis.  DfID’s West African Humanitarian Response Fund (WAHRF) established strategic partnerships with a number of NGOs and allowed them to quickly access crisis/scale-up funding and funding for capacity building and preparedness, but it has now been discontinued.

The UK government

In terms of policy, the UK government is very well placed, with commitments in the new Humanitarian Policy to ‘strengthen anticipation and early action’ in disasters and ‘build resilience to disasters’, as well as support for the Charter to End Extreme Hunger.  But there is still much to do to bring this into practice. The lessons from the Horn of Africa drought, as well as previous droughts, must be learned.

This is thrown into sharp relief and there is need for urgent action because there are worrying signs from the Sahel right now.  Initial reports from the UN’s World Food Programme and Food and Agricultural Organisation amongst others show that the region could face another serious food insecurity situation in 2012, affecting around seven million people, following closely on the 2010 crisis that affected more than ten million people.  Even in a ‘normal’ year, 300,000 children die in the region from malnutrition-related causes, and any small external shock can push these already catastrophic figures much higher still.   

The UK government is a genuine leader in this field and its actions will be closely observed and replicated by other donors.  There is an urgent need to operationalise commitments made, including:

Taking appropriate early action now to prevent another food crisis in the Sahel next year. ECHO has already announced €10 million more funding to head off a major disaster in the region;

Establishing new mechanisms to act quickly in ‘slow onset’ disasters, building on the lessons from the Sahel and the Horn of Africa — this could include new early response funding mechanisms, working with others to develop earlier triggers for action, and institutionalizing a risk management approach;  

Prioritising the elaboration of a regional resilience plan for the Sahel and country resilience plans for Ethiopia and Kenya;

Developing frameworks and appropriate funding mechanisms for long term integrated programming which addresses both chronic vulnerability and acute shocks.

In the Horn of Africa in 2011, the scale of suffering and loss could have been reduced if early warning systems had triggered an earlier and more substantial response.  Major changes are required to respond responsibly to drought risk and reduce its impact on vulnerable people. Or will we be saying the same next year about the Sahel?

Debbie Hillier is Humanitarian Policy Adviser to Oxfam.