On 18th January, Oxfam and Save the Children released their co-authored report, A Dangerous Delay, which concluded that thousands of needless deaths occurred and millions of extra pounds were spent because the international community failed to take decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in East Africa. It also concluded that humanitarian agencies and national governments were too slow to scale up their response to the crisis as many donors wanted proof or evidence of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one.
The report highlighted for example that although early warning systems were forecast about the likelihood of an emergency occurring as early as August 2010, full-scale response was not launched until July 2011 when malnutrition rates in parts of the region had risen substantially and which in turn resulted in increased media attention. Both organisations have called for pre-emptive action in advocating that funding for food emergencies should be sought and released as soon as the crisis signs are clear, rather than the current system which funds large-scale emergency work only when hunger levels have caused unnecessary loss of life and costs in response have increased substantially. The report's recommendations are also backed by other NGOs.
More than 13 million people were affected by the hunger crises in the Horn of Africa. The countries most affected by the crises include Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Somalia where indications of a crisis was apparent from August 2010 and warnings were sounded out in early 2011 regarding the increasingly concerning humanitarian crises. However donors, agencies and governments failed to respond until after rains had failed for a second successive year, by which time the report states, many had lost their livelihoods, particularly women and children, and millions were in the throes of extreme hardship. The report asserts that the scale of suffering, and financial cost could have been reduced if early warning systems had triggered an earlier more substantial response. As a result of the delayed response to the East African hunger crisis, an estimated 50,000 – 100,000 people were reported to have died. A combined approach of the international community, especially one which seeks to manage the risks and not the crisis, one aimed at reducing the risks and one which is designed to respond to early warning signals will surely have averted the unnecessary loss of life and suffering of the inhabitants of the Horn of Africa.
Unfortunately it is impossible to rule out a recurrence of drought, famine and hunger crises in the Horn of Africa. However one hopes that the international community’s response in the future will be based on lessons learnt from the staggered approach in dealing with previous crises, hence the need for national governments, NGOs, and multi agencies alike to consider in some depth the recommendations of A Dangerous Delay. Amongst others, the report recommends that national governments need to be able to fulfil its responsibilities to people caught up in crises and to demonstrate their leadership.
To this end, African leaders, whose ability to deliver good governance is largely questioned, need to work closely and hand in hand with international organisations and NGOs in order to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable, usually women and children, are attended to before the situation reaches crises point. In addition, swift responses to early warning signals is stressed coupled with the recommendation that the international aid community needs to undertake preventative humanitarian work on the basis of forecasts. The report also states that donors need to provide more agile and flexible funding which will support a change of focus from reactionary response to humanitarian crises to the more effective pre-emptive action. With a new food crises looming in the horizon, namely in the Sahel region of Africa, it is hoped that the lessons and recommendations of A Dangerous Delay will be implemented by all those concerned to prevent suffering of the scale witnessed in the Horn of Africa.
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