The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations on Wednesday secured $26.9 million to provide access to food and other basic goods and services in eastern Africa.
The FAO said the funds from Germany will also be used in protecting and restoring productive livelihoods in drought-affected communities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan.
“The new funding represents a significant contribution to mitigating the impacts of drought on food security and livelihoods by increasing immediate food access in rural communities, safeguarding and restoring livelihoods, and rapidly enabling self-reliance,” the FAO said in a statement reaching APA.
It said the intervention seeks to reach almost 1 million of the most vulnerable people in inaccessible and hard-to-reach rural areas, cutting across all impacted livelihoods.
Given the crops have failed, animals die, and populations are displaced across the region, the crippling drought is driving high levels of acute food insecurity across eastern Africa, with more than 22 million people in southern Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia in need of urgent humanitarian food assistance as of March, according to the UN food agency.
It said this figure includes 2.6 million people in Emergency in Kenya and Somalia and more than 96,000 people in Catastrophe in Somalia.
According to the FAO, Ethiopia will receive $7.54 million , Kenya $7 million, Somalia $8.08 million , and Sudan $4.31 million d.
The UN food agency is helping farmers across eastern Africa not just to respond to the effects of climate change, but to proactively adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis, particularly to frequent droughts, by adopting climate-smart farming practices.
MG/abj/APA