Emergency response, 2015
With relief funding from SIM Ethiopia, FSA supported 2,500 malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding women during the 2015 El Niño drought.
Afar is prone to drought, and repeated droughts do more than cause crop failures and food shortages. They kill livestock, which most families depend on to make a living, and leave households more vulnerable each time. The region also has poor roads and few public services, and people here have less access to schools, health care and clean water than almost anywhere else in the country.
FSA has responded to emergencies since 2008. That year, according to the Afar regional government, 10,878 people in our project area were badly affected by drought, and we supported all of them with a grant from SIM Ethiopia. From then until 2010 we took part in the response every time the regional government declared an emergency.
2015
In 2015 the El Niño weather pattern brought us back into emergency work. The Sugum and Karma rains (June and July) largely failed across the Afar region. They came late, were patchy and light, and varied widely from place to place and week to week. The humanitarian situation became very serious and reached emergency level.
The crisis grew beyond what communities and the regional government could handle. In 2015 the regional government declared an emergency and asked all humanitarian organisations to help as much as they could.
With relief funding from SIM Ethiopia, we supported 2,500 malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding women in Dulessa, Awash Fentale and Gala’alo districts. At the time of writing that support is still going on. The emergency has also continued: after the drought came severe flooding, which began in April 2016.