Horn of Africa drought drives 22 million to hunger - in pictures

An area encompassing southern Ethiopia to northern Kenya and Somalia is at risk of hunger owing to the worst drought in four decades

The UN says 12 million people in Ethiopia, 5.6 million in Somalia and 4.3 million in Kenya are 'acutely food insecure' after years of drought. All photos: Eduardo Soteras / AFP

The region's people, many of them herders and subsistence farmers, are enduring their fifth consecutive poor rainy season

The UN says 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes by a lack of water and pasture

The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, and extreme weather events are occurring with increased frequency and intensity

Eight of the 13 past rainy seasons have brought below average rainfall, according to the Climate Hazards Centre in the US

That has brought hardship for millions

The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, when 260,000 people - half of them children under the age of six - died of hunger, partly because the international community did not act fast enough, says the UN

Crops were ravaged by a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021. They have since been wiped out, while livestock has also suffered

UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimated in November that 9.5 million cattle had died

The war in Ukraine has contributed to soaring food and fuel costs, disrupted global supply chains and diverted aid money away from the region

Somalia has been hit hardest, with the drought affecting more than half of its population - about 7.85 million people

In December, OCHA said the nation was not yet in the grip of full-blown famine thanks to the response of aid agencies and local communities

But people were nevertheless suffering "catastrophic" food shortages, it said, and if assistance was not scaled up, famine could be expected in southern Somalia as soon as April

Rural people in Baidoa and Burhakaba districts, and displaced people in Baidoa town and the capital Mogadishu were most at risk

OCHA said that by June, the number of people at risk of starvation was expected to more than triple to 727,000 from October

According to the UN children's agency Unicef, almost two million children across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of hunger

It said in September that 730 children had died between January and July in nutrition centres in Somalia, but that the real numbers were likely to be much higher

Lacking water, milk and food, and often living in squalid conditions, the youngest become so weak they are vulnerable to diseases such as measles and cholera

Unicef said 2.7 million children had stopped going to school

'There is no end in sight for the hunger crisis and hope is slowly fizzling out,' said Xavier Joubert, Ethiopia director for the British charity Save the Children

'There's no doubt that the need has grown to an enormous scale,' he said, in an urgent call for funding

Only 55.5 percent of the $5.9 billion sought by the UN to tackle the crisis has been provided

Early humanitarian action averted a famine in Somalia in 2017

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