Adoaga Ousmane searches for bits of grain stored by ants. It's just the first step in an arduous process of finding and preparing food. Photo by Abbie Trayler-Smith

Women digging through anthills for bits of grain to feed their children is one of the most stark images of hunger in the Sahel region of West Africa, where a food crisis is affecting more than 18 million people. The grain—if women find any stashed there by ants—is hardly enough to satisfy a family. And unearthing it is only one of the laborious steps this coping strategy demands.

Here, in the words of Adoaga Ousmane, a  widow caring for her own children as well as several grandchildren, is what many women in the Guéra region of Chad are enduring. Thin and light-headed with hunger, Ousmane can spend five hours in a round-trip walk to the anthills when she can find no other source of food: Read the rest of this entry »

The stories, said Ismail, are in their eyes.

Ismail Abdalla Algazouli is an Oxfam colleague in Khartoum, Sudan, who spoke to me recently when he returned from a trip to the war-torn state of South Kordofan. He is a security officer whose job is to ensure the safety of our staff, partners, and programs, and in South Kordofan—where  there is fighting between the government and rebels, between nomadic herders and Nuban farmers, and between Sudan and its new neighbor, the nation of South Sudan—his role is crucial.

In Sudan and South Sudan, gathering leaves and unripe fruit from the laloba tree is a desperate measure for people who have little else to feed their families. Photo: Alun McDonald/Oxfam

No bullets were flying where he visited—the  eastern part of the state, where an Oxfam partner is  launching a program to aid families that have fled the violence. But from the looks in their eyes, he said, he could see that people were suffering. Many were afraid to talk about what they’d seen and what they’d lost, because the communities are fractured and unstable: they fear that whatever they say could make them a target of one side today or the other tomorrow.

 What’s more, erratic rains and the disruptions of armed conflict have resulted in poor harvests, so for those who don’t have the means to pay for it, there is little food available. Ismail watched as people gathered unripe fruits of the laloba tree—inedible unless you boil them well—and the wild um medeako—a grape-sized fruit so sour you don’t eat it unless you have to.  Ismail tried, but as he said, “I could not eat even one.”

Despite the constraints of war, Oxfam and our local partner have a chance to help. The work must move quickly to ease the suffering (already we have distributed seeds in time for planting), but gaining people’s confidence will take time.

What we need to do, said Ismail, is listen. “Sit longer, dig deeper, and build relationships of trust.”

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 »

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 »

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 »

Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, carry water to their garden. Photo by Charles Bambara

A colleague the other day sent a computer file of photos from Mali, one of the countries in West Africa where a new food crisis is now threatening 13 million people with hunger.  Drought is among the problems many are struggling with there.

The photos are from the Kayes region near the borders of Senegal and Mauritania where Oxfam’s  partner, Association des Organisations Profesionnelles Paysannes, is working with women’s cooperatives to help families boost their incomes. Gardens are playing a key role in that effort. The pictures showed small plots of plants green and vibrant—amazingly so—in the parched landscape.

I clicked further into the collection and came to a photo of two women, Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, trudging up a steep, sandy slope, each with a bucket of water on her head and one lugging a second bucket by her side. And that’s when it struck me just how precious these patches of green are: It’s the backbreaking labor of women that has made them possible. With local wells running dry and no fuel for a pump to pull water from the River Senegal , Traoré and Bintou are porting water from the river’s edge to keep their vegetables growing.

Studying that picture, I found myself slipping back nearly 40 years to the summer a friend and I had to walk for our water. We were volunteering for a couple of months as fire lookouts and living on a ridge near Mt. Rainier in Washington. Our only source of water was a small, half-frozen lake about a mile’s hike down a steep trail. We dragged the water back up in awkward five-gallon containers. Full, each was about 42 pounds. We dreaded the chore, and back in our lookout, we used that water as sparingly as possible. Neither of us wanted to have to fetch it a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s thanks to the rain that the animals graze; it’s thanks to the rain that we have food,” says Koubra Hamid, who lives with her family in Bahr el Ghazal, Chad. But she is worried.

“This year, it has not rained much, so the pastures are not good enough,” says herder Etta Brahim Senussi. “When an animal dies, it really hurts.” Photo by Andy Hall/Oxfam.

The rains haven’t come. Not enough, and not at the right times. Across the Sahel region of Africa, poor harvests, erratic and inadequate rainfall, and rising food prices are harbingers of what many predict will be a severe food crisis. Already the poorest families are struggling with hunger, and their animals are visibly weakening.

Oxfam is supporting animal feeding and health care to enable farmers and herders to weather the lean season. Photo by Andy Hall/Oxfam.

A top priority now is to prevent farmers and pastoralists from losing their cows, goats, sheep, and camels – and with them their sources of both food and income. Oxfam’s emergency programs include providing livestock with improved water sources, fodder to supplement the dwindling pasture, and vaccinations to counteract the damage drought and hunger could do to their health. (View “ Taha vaccinates 1,000 goats per day.”)

“We’re tired and frustrated,” says Hamid. “But there are also moments when we laugh with our children.”

Kenny Rae/Oxfam America

This just came to us from Kenny Rae, a public health engineer currently working in southern Ethiopia helping to rehabilitate water systems.

“As with other pastoralist families in Dire district in Southern Ethiopia, 10-year-old Guyo Hamadi and his family are traveling with their herd of cattle in an increasingly more difficult search for water and fodder. Guyo and his father and brother will travel more than 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) to provide water for their herd, of which they have already lost one third due to the drought. Oxfam’s drought response program in Dire includes rehabilitating wells that will provide water for people and their livestock, and the delivery of water by tanker truck to meet immediate needs in outlying areas.”

Oxfam aims to reach 3 million people in the East Africa region with a variety of support including food aid, clean water, and veterinary care for animals.  We are also campaigning to change the root causes of this crisis. Find out how you can support our efforts.

Tede Lokapelo holds a day's worth of food. Photo by Rankin

A severe food crisis and drought is now affecting millions of people in East Africa. Among the areas hit hardest is northern Kenya’s Turkana region, where many people are herders who depend on their animals—camels, cows, goats, and sheep—for both food and income.

In March 2011, the photographer Rankin visited Turkana to capture photos and stories of people affected by the ongoing crisis. In the excerpt below, Tede Lokapelo, 85, talks about the dramatic changes he has witnessed in his lifetime.

“We are poor because the season is always dry. Everything dies, every day, every day, every day. For me the world has changed for the worse. We are living with a lot of uncertainties—no water, no food.

“It used to rain even when the grass was still green. It was never dry like this. Now maybe it rains for a few minutes or a few hours, but the earth is too dry nothing can be absorbed. This kind of drizzly rain is useless. If you look at the ground it is not even wet. You can tell whether the rain will be good or bad by looking at those mountains. You see that kind of smoke or fog? That is a symbol of the dry season. That fog needs to clear before the big rain clouds can come, then the skies can open and it will rain like it used to for days. It used to rain so that floods and rivers appear. But that will not happen until that fog disappears.

“In this community there are people called rain makers. In the past, when we had a prolonged drought, all the men would go and see the rain maker. We would sit under a special tree in the mountains and pray for rain. But God seems to have become too far away, and these traditions don’t work anymore.

“Back then we had everything, even wild animals were everywhere. There were antelopes, ostriches, wild cats, even lions, elephants, buffalo, leopards, everything. The last time I saw a lion it was 1971. By 1971 we could not see any animals here. The antelope remained around for a while but by 1988 the antelopes also started dying. The wild animals found no grass here, just dust. There was no shade for them. They began slowly dying of hunger. Those that could walk began walking away. They went to places where they could find shade and water.

“I miss those animals very much. The environment is not complete without them.

“ [Today] I only have seven goats left. I used to have 200. … This drought has taught me a lesson. I have learned that it is too difficult to keep animals. Our strong dependence on livestock, our old way of life, has completely gone.”

Oxfam aims to reach 3 million people–1.3 million in Kenya, 700,000 in Ethiopia, and 500,000 in Somalia—with a variety of support, including food aid, clean water, and veterinary care for animals. We are drilling and repairing wells and distributing fuel vouchers to ensure that pumps on the wells can keep operating—even if people have no money. Find out how you can support our efforts.