Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment she has made of the effect of the Government's efforts to alleviate food shortages in Eastern Africa.

The Government helps to alleviate food shortages in East Africa through both emergency support and longer-term development. The UK’s multi-year humanitarian programmes give agencies more capacity to prepare, plan and respond in a timely way. We invest in risk monitoring, early humanitarian response, safety nets protecting vulnerable people and the development of agricultural productivity and markets. The impact of our interventions is regularly evaluated including by independent organisations.

For example, in South Sudan, United Nations’ analysis found that the 2014 emergency food security response, to which the UK was a very significant contributor, was a critical factor in averting the widely-predicted outbreak of famine in 2014. In Kenya, UK funding ensures that over 1.3 million people, of which two thirds are women, now have a bank account and can receive emergency cash transfers during a drought. DFID’s FoodTrade Eastern and Southern Africa programme aims to develop the regional market in grains, and is expected to help reduce acute food shortages in East Africa in the long term, while directly benefiting 1.8 million people by 2018.