Hunger: East Africa and the Horn of Africa

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Gray. I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for securing this important debate. I refer Members to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am also chair of the all-party parliamentary group for water, sanitation and hygiene.

I lived in Kenya for four years, and I know that the connections between this country and east Africa go very deep. I hardly meet any group of people without finding someone with an east Africa connection.

British people care, enormously, which is shown by the huge, generous support for recent aid requests, the strength of feeling about suffering and the feeling that British people want to help. But the east Africa food crisis has gone relatively unreported, and is not being raised as much as it should be, and so I am grateful that we are holding this debate.

This is the worst humanitarian crisis in 40 years. More than 50 million people have been pushed to acute food insecurity, and a person dies every six seconds in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya—it is hard to get our heads around these figures, and the desperation. This is a perfect storm of climate change, with five successive rainy season failures and a likely sixth one, right now; conflict; disease outbreaks; the cost of living crisis; a reduction in aid; and countries saddled with unpayable levels of debt. Undoubtedly, it is political decisions that have led to this crisis.

About 22.7 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia face high levels of food insecurity—desperate hunger—compared with 18.6 million last August. That is an increase of 4 million people in the past six months, which shows how severe the drought has been.

The crisis is chronically underfunded—the overall funding requirements stand at about $5.1 billion for Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia—and that underfunding is unsustainable. Implementing partners are having to stop projects and suspend or reduce lifesaving programmes due to underfunding at this critical time.

As always, women and girls are affected the most—they are on the frontline. They suffer higher risks of malnutrition and violence, and there is increased child and forced marriage.

Verity is an aid worker from CAFOD, who reported from a recent visit to northern Kenya:

“Returning from Marsabit, the situation is desperate and deteriorating. I was shocked by the scale of livestock deaths, asset loss and clear desperation of communities. I was struck by the huge numbers of dead animals—mostly camels; the cattle are long gone. The landscape and roadsides are littered with carcasses, some are skeletons, some have fallen only hours before. The condition of any remaining animals is extremely poor…

There is no grazing—the assessments rate the availability of pasture in Marsabit as ‘extreme’—in many places it looks like the surface of the moon. Endless rock and dust—not a blade of grass… In towns there is no land available so groups are scattered, there is little water and little assistance. The households we spoke to had driven away their last remaining camels into the bush as they knew they would die and they would not be able to move the bodies if they died near the homestead. People are dignified but desperate…you can sense fear. People are talking of death.”

Aid agencies have for months been calling for the UK to increase aid to the region by £70 million, but this has not happened. Where is our aid money going instead? It has been drastically cut, skewed towards trade and spent on propping up the failing Home Office. The International Development Committee’s recent report, “Aid spending in the UK”, was very illuminating. For a start, the facts about aid spending were hard to find. The Committee found that it was not transparent and that recent answers from the Minister were “wilfully opaque”. The report said:

“The proportion of aid spent in the UK has drastically increased in recent years, while programmes supporting people in the world’s poorest countries were cut”,

which goes to the heart of this matter. The report also said:

“In 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, the Government spent more than £1 billion of the aid budget on in-country refugee costs”

in the UK, including hotels.

It is a crazy situation. There are fantastic young people—from Ethiopia, for example—travelling here who did not want to leave their country, but the money is being spent on hotel costs, instead of on helping them to stay in Ethiopia and support their own country, which is where they want to be. Save the Children has estimated that the cost of spending in the UK could be as high a £4.5 billion in 2022-23, accounting for one third of the entire aid budget. It is just extraordinary. Water and sanitation programmes have been cut by 80%, which does not match what British people want their aid to be spent on. In the last financial year, the UK pledged only £156 million to the crisis, which is less than a fifth of the £861 million provided in 2017-18.

To conclude, I ask the Minister to urgently commit to release already-pledged funding, to invest in and support communities and primary healthcare, to cut the debt, to transform the UK’s agriculture portfolio towards local, diverse food systems, to fund water and sanitation projects as an emergency response, and to introduce clear targets to increase funds reaching local organisations, rather than just through multilateral organisations. The climate emergency is very real. I hope that both the media and Ministers are listening to this debate today, and that urgent action will be taken to save lives.