(click on the image to expand the infographic)

A food crisis is now gripping the Sahel region of West Africa. A host of factors–including erratic rainfall, meager harvests, and the lingering effects of an earlier food crisis in 2010–have combined to put more than 18 million people at risk of hunger. For the latest information about who’s affected and where, Oxfam’s response, and how you can help, check out our new infographic above. Then share it with others and help us raise awareness about a crisis that’s not making headlines.

Oxfam is aiming to help 1.2 million people across seven countries with programs that include cash transfers and cash-for-work initiatives, veterinary care for the livestock on which many families depend, and access to clean water and sanitation. We are also campaigning to change the root causes of this crisis. Find out how you can support our efforts.

I recently visited the far eastern Kedougou region of Senegal, where inconsistent rains last summer led to a poor harvest in the fall. Since then food prices have shot up, and many there are struggling to find the food they need to survive each day, all the while worrying about how they will procure the seeds and other agricultural inputs they need to plant when the rains come, with any luck, in May or June. The farmers I met spoke about the struggle to feed their families and the concerns they have about the upcoming rainy season. They described the creative ways they have earned food money to make up for their poor harvest last fall, and what they need to be able to plant when the rains come. I was impressed with how resourceful the people are, how hard they work, and most of all by their determination to plant crops this year. However, all the farmers I spoke with were worried about finding the resources they need to plant– and eat– during the upcoming rainy season.

Please share this with others and contribute to our West Africa Food Crisis Fund. Oxfam is putting in place programs to help farmers in Kedougou and other areas of West Africa with seeds and other agricultural support, so they can plant this spring. We are also planning work that will help keep their drinking water clean and safe, and to provide food or short-term work for cash wages, so farmers will have food over the summer while they work their fields. With your help, we can expand this work to include as many people as possible and head off a major disaster.

Baobab trees

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Baobab trees near the road east from Dakar to Kedougou (700 kilometers): During the dry season it is hard to imagine growing anything in the semi-arid, Sahelian climate in Senegal. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

Oxfam is aiming to help 1.2 million people across seven countries with programs that include cash transfers and cash-for-work initiatives, veterinary care for the livestock on which many families depend, and access to clean water and sanitation. We are also campaigning to change the root causes of this crisis. Find out how you can support our efforts.

Kassa Danfakha: “We need good quality seed, for rice, groundnuts, millet, and maize.” Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

Kassa Danfakha says usually one of his biggest concerns in the growing season is cows wandering on to his millet field and eating his plants. It’s a significant source of conflict in the community, but last year he had bigger worries.

“Last fall I got almost no harvest. There was not enough rain,” he says, sitting by his home in Bembou, in Senegal’s far eastern Kedougou region. “The first rains came and the seeds we planted started to grow, but then the rain was very irregular. At one point the rain stopped and the plants died.”

“Some more rain came later but we had no more seeds to plant.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Kenny Rae traveled to Ethiopia in March to support relief efforts for communities in the Bale zone who are struggling to overcome the East Africa drought and food crisis.

Every morning Yenee leaves her two children in the care of her sister and ventures off to collect water for her family. After walking for two hours she arrives at the spring–the only source of water for miles around.

She is not alone. In Laga Hidha, a remote district in southeast Ethiopia which hasn’t seen rain for over a year, collecting water for drinking, cooking and bathing can be an all day affair–every day. At mid-morning at the spring there can sometimes be more than 100 women, some of whom have walked for more than seven miles. She will wait patiently in line for another two hours to fill her  jerrycans. She then returns home, carrying 30 liters (66 pounds weight) of water on her back.

In some parts of Ethiopia, women like Yenee walk several miles to collect water for their families and livestock. Photo by Kenny Rae / Oxfam America.

It wasn’t always like this. Nine years ago a well equipped with a hand pump  was installed in her village which provided water for all. Twice yearly rains would replenish the open wells and ponds that provided water for livestock, for bathing and  for laundering clothes.

The hand pump has been broken for over a year, and a promise to replace it by an aid agency has yet to be fulfilled. The prolonged drought has caused the open wells and ponds to dry up, and the cattle and goats that benefited from them have been sold off or have perished. Where there was once pasture, there in now only dust. Those determined to hold on to a couple of animals for milk must venture further and further from home to find food for their animals.

In Hidha Hunda village, an elder told us that one of the few remaining cows had, the day before been taken in search of food  and water and, miles away, had collapsed from hunger. Its owner left it where it lay and returned home. In every village we visited here, and in the neighboring district of Sawena we learned of the hardships that people are dealing with.

In  Gale  village all the  livestock has been sold. Families were unable to  keep one or two animals for milk as the surrounding pasture is long depleted. No crops have been cultivated for over a year. Collecting honey used to provide additional income for the villagers but, without water and flowers, the bees are gone. Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin getting a taste of the local food and drink in Ethiopia. Photo credit: Audra Melton / Oxfam.

NFL wide receivers Anquan Boldin of the Baltimore Ravens and Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals are currently in Ethiopia with Oxfam staff to raise awareness about the food crisis in East Africa and see first-hand the effects of the drought. During the trip the players are meeting with local people, Oxfam partner organizations, and Ethiopian athletes. They are also visiting Oxfam development projects.

The players participated in a live call with fans and Oxfam supporters and from the field today. Fitzgerald said on the call: “I’m blessed to be able to come over here. And I feel like the work that we’re trying to do, the attention that we’re trying to raise, and the awareness is not going to fall on deaf ears.”

Listen to a full recording of their conversation.

Watch a Public Service Announcement from the players. And donate now to help save lives in East Africa.

There are two grocery stores in my neighborhood. One features soft lighting, spacious aisles, and well-labeled shelves of neatly stacked items. The other is a chaos of glaring fluorescence, where you’re likely to get sideswiped by another shopper’s overstuffed cart as you swerve between haphazard piles of random food products. But when I compared my receipts, I realized that at the second store, whose motto is “more for your dollar,” I bought about 20 percent more groceries for the exact same price.

When graphic designer Jessica Erickson and I set out to create an infographic, see left, about US food aid spending, we decided to model it on the humble grocery store receipts that we all keep tucked away in our wallets. As consumers, we keep track of what we’re buying in order to make sure we’re spending our money wisely. The food aid our tax dollars buy is no different. The facts show that we’re currently spending more on special interest regulations—shipping, overhead, and other government red tape—than we are on life-saving food itself. Rather than more for our dollars, we’re actually getting less.

Every day, we make choices about where we shop so we can get the best value for our money. Now we should ask our legislators to do the same. By cutting the red tape and purchasing food aid locally in developing countries, we can save millions more lives, make the world safer, and boost local businesses, too. All of which adds up to a value that’s pretty much priceless.

Maka Djibo is the president of a garden co-operative in Niger. Photo by Fatoumata Diabate/Oxfam

Hungry for spring, people here seemed to be celebrating in the disturbingly high temperatures that hit Boston last week. But all I could think about was how parched the ground is at a time of year when it should be spongy with the snowmelt that replenishes the ground water we’ll need later this summer.

How would we manage if there was a severe water shortage here?

I keep thinking about the daily struggle countless families in West Africa are now facing as their limited water supplies shrink: a food crisis is looming for millions of people, triggered in part by little rainfall.

Poor harvests in Banibangou village in Niger, near the border with Mali, means that some families have already exhausted their supply of millet. But women there are working to stave off the worst with produce harvested from their vegetable co-operative. Read the rest of this entry »

Ubah Hassan is a model and activist, and the President and Co-founder of Maji Umbrellas. Ubah has also served as a spokesperson for FEED projects and recently became a Sisters on the Planet Ambassador for Oxfam America.

As a model, I promote luxury goods—handbags, shoes, and couture clothing. But as an activist, social entrepreneur, and native of Somalia, I know what real luxury is: access to clean water.

Since the July 2011 declaration of famine in Somalia by the United Nations, I have been thinking a lot about water and food shortages in the Horn of Africa. I recently partnered with Oxfam America and created Maji Umbrellas to raise awareness about the crisis in East Africa and money for the 13 million people affected by the drought and famine. Maji will donate a portion of each umbrella purchase to Oxfam America’s relief work in East Africa, enough to provide a day’s supply of clean water to 20 people.

One in eight people has inadequate access to water supplies. And that lack of clean water claims more lives each year than all forms of violence on the planet combined.

The numbers are shocking. And the reality’s even worse.

I know firsthand what it’s like to go thirsty. I was born in Somalia and, at the age of seven, fled this war-torn country to Kenya with my brother and father. There were many days in Kenya when my family, neighbors, and I went with very little water. Sometimes the water pipe in my town would break or the water would get contaminated. When that happened, we’d travel for hours to the next village to get water. And once we got there, we had to wait for hours while others who arrived before us filled their canteens. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, The New York Times is discussing Oxfam, “The Hunger Games,” and The Harry Potter Alliance. What do these seemingly random groups have in common, you ask? Each shed light on the outcomes (real and imagined, in the case of the books and film) of food shortages in a resource-constrained world.

An excerpt: “This week, Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” hits the big screen. As the latest wildly popular young adult (Y.A.) novel becomes a film franchise, it’s not just box office dollars that will be captured, but potentially nascent citizens. At least that’s the goal of the social campaign called “Hunger Is Not a Game” which aims to connect fans to the global food justice movement.

“”The Hunger Games” devotees have long congregated on sites like Mockingjay.net, Down with the Capitol, and the “Hunger Games” Fireside Chat podcast. Now Oxfam, with its long history focused on famine relief, has joined forces with a small, fan-focused group” to encourage young people to join Oxfam’s GROW campaign to ensure everyone has enough to eat now and in the future.

Boy, that’s a lot of campaigns you say? Yes, but sometimes social change movements coming together can be a beautiful thing. Later this week, hundreds of young volunteers will set-up shop at movie theaters across the country to bring fans of the “The Hunger Games” movie on-board to GROW.

“Our members know that change isn’t easy and it requires helping others to understand what’s at the root of the problem,” said Andrew Slack, Executive Director of the Harry Potter Alliance, the sponsor organization behind “Hunger is not a Game.”

“The GROW campaign gives our members a chance to really make a difference in their communities by putting emphasis on an issue that can effect anyone from their neighbor down the street to a child tens of thousands of miles away.”

Watch this quick video to learn more

Drought has reduced available pasture for livestock herds in eastern Senegal. Photo by Aliou Bassoum/Oxfam America.

Second of two posts by guest blogger Aliou Bassoum, Oxfam America’s regional communications officer in Dakar, Senegal.

It takes a little more than an hour on a red dirt road through forests and millet fields to find the village of Balkissima, population 162. We can still see a few stalks in the fields, left over from the harvest last fall here in the region of Kolda. According to an assessment by the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization in November, about 138,800 people in Kolda are at high risk of food insecurity.

Some of them are here. They are mostly farmers and herders in Balkissima, a small village with a few mud-walled houses. Around one of them, the home of the chief, stand a few cows. This area is well known for raising livestock.

The food crisis here in southern Senegal is not just hitting people. The livestock are also suffering, and becoming quite skinny, almost puny in size. The village chief, Amadou Korka Balde, says it is due to lack of pasture in the area, and the poor quality of what grass is there during the dry winter months.

Read the rest of this entry »