Food and Water Security

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Stephanie Hanson, director of policy and outreach at One Acre Fund. She explains the specific obstacles facing Africa’s female farmers and One Acre Fund’s model for addressing them. Meet Cecilia, a smallholder farmer in Lutacho village, western Kenya. Cecilia is thirty years old, and has three children with her husband. When I first met Cecilia in early 2010, agriculture was her only profession, and she was not able to grow enough food to feed her family. Cecilia is just like millions of smallholder farmers in Africa, where agriculture is the dominant form of employment, and up to 75 percent of agriculture producers are women. Collectively, these women spend thousands of hours working on their crops, only to produce meager harvests insufficient to feed their families. Breaking the cycle of hunger and poverty for women like Cecilia requires an innovation in agriculture productivity. Women smallholder farmers face four major challenges: Poor quality seed and no fertilizer: Women have difficulty accessing seed and fertilizer; they generally do not have the money or the time to travel to an agro-dealer. No access to credit: It is particularly difficult for women to access credit in rural communities, as most do not have formal title to their primary asset, land. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), only 10 percent of credit in sub-Saharan Africa is extended to women. Limited education and training: Most women have only completed a few years of primary school, so they need agriculture education and training that is delivered in person. No access to markets: The business of selling crops is male-dominated, and women have difficulty negotiating with traders to obtain a fair price for their crops. In the last few years, an increasing number of development actors have acknowledged the importance of tackling these challenges in order to spur broad agriculture growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Reports from the World Bank (2008), the FAO (2010-11), and the UN Foundation (forthcoming) all highlight the particular obstacles faced by female farmers. Researchers for the latter report identified 34 different organizations or projects that explicitly targeted women farmers and were widely considered successful, but many of the organizations were not operating at scale. The nonprofit organization that I work for, One Acre Fund, has spent the past six years developing a scalable operating model to address the major challenges that smallholder farmers face, and to serve female smallholders like Cecilia as customers. Our operating model—farm inputs, financing, training, and market facilitation—offers a complete bundle of services meant to enable any female smallholder farmer to increase her income and become food secure. First, we distribute seed and fertilizer deep into the rural areas where our farmers live. Those inputs are provided on credit so the farmer does not have to pay cash up front. During the growing season, One Acre Fund staff provide extensive training to farmers on planting technique, composting, and erosion control, among other topics. Finally, after the harvest, staff offer training on handling and storing crops and negotiating with traders. This model enables women smallholders to double their farm income per planted acre. Each year, One Acre Fund measures the harvest of at least 1,000 One Acre Fund farmers, as well as the harvests of a control group. This harvest survey consistently shows a 100 percent increase in income per planted acre, net of expenses on farm inputs and labor. When Cecilia had her first One Acre Fund harvest in 2010, for instance, she harvested 1.8 tons of maize from one-half acre of land—a big improvement over her previous year’s harvest of 600 pounds. This was more than enough to feed her family through “the hot period,” or hunger season, which would occur before the next year’s harvest. Cecilia decided to increase her acreage the next year and harvested 3.6 tons of maize from 1 acre of land. She sold a portion of her surplus and opened a shop in a nearby market for her husband to run. “I wanted him to feel like he had a job too!” she told me. Cecilia is just one of One Acre Fund’s 135,000 customers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. We think our model can scale to reach 1.5 million farmers by 2020. But those customers will be a fraction of the 35 million smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa who do not produce enough food to feed their families. We need many models that successfully reach women smallholders, and they need to be scalable. Scaling them up will not be easy. Practitioners need to be willing to share information—not only about what works, but about what doesn’t work. In many cases, learning about one organization’s mistakes can help another organization avoid making the same ones. At One Acre Fund, we’ve tested plenty of things that haven’t worked. For instance, early in our Kenya operation, we asked farmers to repay their loans with surplus production, instead of in cash. As it turned out, farmers hated this idea, and vocally told One Acre Fund staff. Some explained that it was bad luck to let maize, the staple food, leave the community. Others said they feared not being able to purchase maize at the market later in the season. In response, we decided to accept cash repayment. Our history is full of stories like this one, and they have helped us build a stronger operation. We’ve been successful because we listen to feedback from our farmers, and iterate on our operations over time to respond to their concerns and interests. In the last few years, interest in agriculture development has grown significantly. Many actors are now working to boost agricultural livelihoods in Africa, from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa to initiatives such as the U.S. government’s Feed the Future and the G-8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Some are focusing on direct field work with farmers, while others work on improving the policy environment. We have ten staff dedicated to advocating for policies that benefit our clients, as well as safeguarding the progress that they are making. It’s heartening to see that women feature prominently in all of the new global agriculture endeavors. There is now widespread consensus on the challenges that women farmers face, and those challenges have been extensively documented and analyzed. This knowledge offers a tremendous opportunity for impact. For practitioners in the agriculture sector, it’s our responsibility to turn this knowledge into action. We need to learn from our failures, as well as our successes, and we need to be laser-focused on our customers: women smallholder farmers.

Yesterday on my blog, I discussed the current outlook for food security in the Sahel. While a large humanitarian response and welcome rainfall have averted an immediate crisis, the region continues to face underlying problems ranging from unreliable weather to the conflict in Mali. As I conclude: Possible elements of a patchwork of solutions include more attention to the unique needs of small-scale farmers and pastoralists, plus interventions adapted to local contexts, like irrigation and better access to drought-resistant seeds and other agricultural inputs. Further experimentation with cash vouchers is also important. But ultimately, the Sahel’s food insecurity issues cannot be addressed without improvements in regional security and local governance. You can read the full post here.

It baffles me that the Western media is paying so little attention to the flooding in Nigeria. There are dramatic aerial photographs of the flooding in the Delta, and affected areas spread as far afield as Kano and Kogi states in northern and central Nigeria. Over a million people have been displaced. In the Delta alone, tens of thousands have been moved into camps that are ill-equipped to receive them.  Crop fields and fisheries in their thousands of hectares are completely flooded and destroyed. Local food shortages seem inevitable; though President Goodluck Jonathan is confident existing grain stores will be sufficient. In over-crowded camps with poor sanitation, the spread of infectious disease also seems inevitable. Deaths–direct and indirect–from flooding in Nigeria this season, may exceed the total associated with Boko Haram. UN humanitarian agencies often sound the alarm about impending humanitarian crises, as they have done in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. For example, the World Health Organization’s Africa Regional Director, Dr. Luis Gomes Sambo, on October 25, called attention to the Sahel’s need for international help to combat Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) that have spread because of flooding in that region. But these UN agencies are, by and large, not present in the Niger Delta. Other international NGOs, including Oxfam and the Red Cross and Red Crescent, are present however. Their relative quiet is hard to understand. The Nigerian federal government in Abuja does not seem to be asking for the international assistance it clearly needs. Meanwhile, the Western media is, almost universally, giving the flooding stories a pass. Is it a case of seeing the floods as yet another dreary story out of Africa, and Nigeria in particular, that allows news agencies to draw the  conclusion that their readership would have only a limited interest?

Last week I introduced the SERF Index, a new measurement tool my colleagues Susan Randolph, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, and I have built to evaluate social and economic rights fulfillment. The new index sheds important light on the issues facing the Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council, where Argentina, Gabon, Ghana, Peru, Guatemala, Benin, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Pakistan, Zambia, Japan, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka will be evaluated on their human rights practices under applicable international human rights conventions from October 22 to November 5. This year’s session will be the fourteenth meeting of the Universal Periodic Review since its first session in March 2006. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has underlined the importance of the upcoming session, noting that the Universal Periodic Review “has great potential to promote and protect human rights in the darkest corners of the world.” Yet the review process faces trying challenges, and wide scrutiny, in effecting real change in human rights situations on the ground. The SERF Index can help us analyze performance in the countries up for review. Some highlights: Overall, Argentina performs well, ranking thirteenth out of 98 countries on the SERF Index. Argentina consistently meets 80 percent or more of its obligations on the right to food, education, work, and health, which is surprising given the challenges the country faced during its economic crisis almost a decade ago. Nonetheless, Argentina could do better by focusing resources on its weakest area: the right to housing, for which the government meets only 78 percent of its potential. Data on Gabon reveals that even when limited state capacity is taken into account, the government is still underperforming in meeting its obligations to fulfill social and economic rights. Gabon achieves only 52 percent of its potential in providing citizens with the right to food—with 26 percent of its population stunted or not receiving adequate nutrition. Gabon’s fulfillment of the right to education is also quite low. Gabon’s performance in the right to housing is particularly bad, scoring a 20 percent fulfillment rate—ranking second to last on the SERF Index. Instead of dismissing Ghana as a middle-of-the-road development country, it should be commended for its efforts in some areas and supported in refocusing attention to others. Ghana is an example of a country that is, in general, meeting the rights of its citizens even with very little. Ghana reaches 80 percent or more of its obligations in the rights to work, food, and education, despite its median ranking on human development indicators. However, the SERF Index parses out the country’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. The Ghanaian government fulfills the right to health at only 60 percent and the right to housing at an unimpressive 52 percent, showing that although the government is successful in providing certain rights, it could perform much better in others. Benin struggles to meet its capacity for fulfilling the social and economic rights of its populace—ranking in the bottom fifteen of all the countries analyzed on the SERF Index—with a fulfillment of 52.5 percent. Benin’s categorization is also similar on the HDI, which ranks Benin as a “low human development” country. However, a closer examination of Benin’s fulfillment of specific rights shows that, in comparison to other indicators, the country is most successful in providing the right to education, at roughly 68 percent, versus the right to work (at 41 percent) or the right to food (at 46 percent). Peru seems like a a middle-of-the pack country at first glance, but SERF indicators offer a more nuanced perspective that can be useful for UN human rights evaluators to determine how the Peruvian government can close the gaps in human rights fulfillment. Peru performs especially well on the right to education at a high rate of 97 percent fulfillment, but struggles in the area of housing rights, meeting only 58 percent of its obligations. Guatemala, in most regards, scores at an above average rate when compared to other countries in the SERF Index. But while HDI characterizes Guatemala as a medium human development country, SERF reveals that the country is failing to address its food crisis. Although Guatemala fulfills the right to education (at 72 percent) and work (at 76 percent), the country scores above only two countries—Yemen and Afghanistan—on the right to food, meeting a mere 17 percent of its obligations. Switzerland is not currently ranked by the SERF Index. Overall Pakistan appears to be doing poorly. The government fails to meet even half of its obligations for fulfillment on the rights to education, food, and work. However, the SERF Index shows that Pakistan is not a hopeless case. Despite its limited resources, the country does relatively well in meeting its obligations for the right to housing (at 74 percent) and is about average in its fulfillment for healthcare, at 66 percent. Zambia barely meets 57 percent of its rights fulfillment capacity. But when we look in detail at the right to education, the country does remarkably well. It meets almost 92 percent of its capacity, given available resources. This presents a different picture that the one seen when only looking at HDI measurements, which neglect the great resource constraints Zambia faces and fail to take into account the country’s efforts on the right to education. However, the government could do better on other SERF indicators, particularly the right to food and work, where it meets only 44 and 39 percent of its capabilities, respectively. Japan is not currently ranked on the SERF Index. Ukraine ranks seventh overall on the SERF Index, with approximately a 91 percent fulfillment rate. The country also ranks highly among those assessed by the HDI, but an analysis of individual SERF indicators shows that while Ukraine performs well on the rights to work and education, efforts should be concentrated on improving the right to food, for which the country’s fulfillment currently stands at roughly 77 percent. Sri Lanka is another example of a country performing well in spite of limited resources. Ranking in the top thirty on the SERF Index, Sri Lanka meets 84 percent of its capacity overall. Specifically, the country reaches 85 percent of its capabilities or higher on the rights to housing, health, education, and food. However, the country falls short on the right to work, meeting only 63 percent of its capabilities—a nuance that is missed when looking at the country’s medium human development ranking on the HDI. While the SERF Index can help provide a fuller picture, it is by no means a complete one. No one index can perfectly capture the realities on the ground, and multiple sources of information should be used simultaneously to provide a complete picture. Nevertheless, the SERF Index can help global governance institutions and civil society organizations hold states accountable for meeting the social and economic rights of their people.

Yesterday on my blog, I discussed the challenge of identifying the most effective ways to overcome obstacles to women’s economic potential. This was the subject of a meeting of the ExxonMobil roundtable series last week at the Council on Foreign Relations. As I write: Clearly, more research is needed to understand how best to focus limited resources on improving women’s economic potential. The opportunity is significant: for example, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that equalizing access to productive resources between female and male farmers could increase agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent. The full post is available here.

On his blog last week, CFR senior fellow John Campbell discussed Zimbabwe’s failing maize crops and growing food aid needs. While the government says that drought is the main cause, Campbell suggests that policy is also responsible. As he argues: Certainly there is drought in Zimbabwe. But official government policy probably has turned an agricultural challenge into a disaster. You can read the full post here.

With so much attention to stonings, amputations, and the destruction of world heritage sites by radical Islamists in the north and the sometimes grotesque political ballet in Bamako, it is easy to lose sight of the dawning humanitarian nightmare of malnutrition, and internal displacement and refugees, all of which encourage disease.  As of the present, the international community is ill-prepared to cope. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 53,000 Malians have fled to Niger and 96,000 to Mauritania. UNHCR estimates that 174,000 Malians are internally displaced. The World Food Program (WFP) has enough food to feed 60,000 Malians until the end of September.  A WFP official estimates that 77,000 need food aid – other estimates are much higher. Malnutrition often combined with malaria is not new among children in the south. In 2011, before the present political crisis became so acute, a government survey found 150,000 acutely malnourished children.  Medicines sans Frontiers estimates that 30,000 of them were treated by aid agencies and the government.  Nobody seems to know what happened to the other 120,000. There is anecdotal evidence that the situation is much worse this year. In the north, malnutrition in the past was less prevalent because the diet was protein-rich among pastoralists:  meat, milk, and tea.  But, now pastoralists’ access to pasture is reduced, animals are dying, and cereal prices are high because of the pervasive drought and conflict. There are also estimates that rice production will be reduced by 20-30 percent this year. Aggravating the food and health crisis, many health workers fled and clinics closed with the coming of the Islamists. The international community must help.  But, according to the UN, the World Food Program has a 36 percent budget shortfall. The shortfall for UNHCR is 66 percent.   Overall, the funding shortfall for UN agencies working in Mali and the Sahel is about 58 percent. Yet, as a practical matter, it is these agencies often working closely with NGOs that are the means by which the international community responds to disaster. Governments need to open their wallets--now. Agencies need lead time to buy and stockpile food and medicine. And, for WFP at least, the food runs out in September.

Yesterday, I wrote on my blog, Democracy in Development, about the struggle to boost agricultural production and food security in Malawi. As I noted: The high-poverty nation of Malawi is one country particularly sensitive to today’s rising food prices and adverse weather. Last year, 200,000 Malawians needed food aid, but in early 2013, when the so-called lean season will be at its worst, an estimated 1.6 million people may require it. You can read the full post here.

Yesterday on my blog, I wrote about Africa’s unrealized agricultural potential and the efforts of KickStart, a non-profit that is working to boost yields through low-cost irrigation technology. As I write: Today, just 6 percent of Africa’s cultivated land is irrigated as opposed to 14 percent in Latin America and 37 percent in Asia. Expanding irrigation in Africa could make a huge difference for the continent’s food insecure people, and also contribute to global food supplies. You can read the full post here.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Nadia Oshry, Adam Bradlow, Robin Miller, and Angela R. Hansen of Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Oshry, Bradlow, and Miller are based in Dalberg’s Johannesburg office; Hansen is the director of the Johannesburg office and leads the firm’s Agriculture and Food Security practice. In the article, they evaluate the potential of information and communications technology to boost agricultural production and the incomes of small-scale farmers in Africa. Through agriculture, Africa has the potential to be the breadbasket of the world and a powerhouse of poverty reduction. Unfortunately for Africans and for the global food system, that tremendous potential is currently laying fallow. Although sub-Saharan Africa’s cereal production has tripled in the past 50 years, cereal output per capita has fallen by 13 percent, compared to increases of almost 50 percent in Asia and South America. One in four Africans are undernourished and over one-third subsist on less than $1 per day. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most food-insecure region in the world, yet it is home to over 60 percent of the world’s unfarmed but arable land. Agriculture is the primary source of employment for up to 80 percent of the region’s ballooning population. And economic growth stemming from agriculture can mean up to seven times more income growth for the poorest of the poor than growth in other sectors (see graph above). These statistics suggest that traditional development approaches are either not working or not working fast enough. Trend-reversing breakthroughs are urgently needed in African agriculture. One area to look for these breakthroughs is the information and communications technology (ICT) sector—specifically, mobile technology. While there are mobile applications for nearly every conceivable domain, tools geared toward agriculture are still relatively nascent. Yet the potential is high: by linking rural communities directly to local and global markets, mobile technology can limit the impact of institutional inefficiencies, empower local farmers to navigate their own market relationships, and reduce dependence on weak national infrastructure. Though not a silver bullet, mobile technologies hold the potential to help turn African agriculture into a competitive business that stokes economic growth, reduces poverty, and helps the continent realize its potential. ICT also seems to be an economic boon in general. Studies have shown a clear link between higher rates of ICT use and lower rates of poverty. This is not necessarily a causal relationship, as the poor enjoy less access to ICT, but it suggests that ICT can be a powerful tool for income generation and empowerment. One World Bank study, for example, found a 10 percent increase in ICT penetration to be correlated with GDP gains of 1.2 to 1.38 percent. For mobile networks, the positive relationship between ICTs and economic growth is even more pronounced, with a 1 percent growth in mobile penetration in developing countries correlated with a 5 percent increase in GDP. So how can innovation and ICT help African countries reverse the trajectory of agricultural production and help smallholder farmers realize their potential? ICTs are already widely used in large-scale farms and the commercial sector, but their potential for small-scale farmers and associated groups has not been exploited. This is changing, though, as mobile technology spreads, offering opportunities for businesses and business associations, farmers and grower groups, researchers and trainers, governments, and NGOs.  ICT can help improve productivity by providing information ranging from agricultural techniques to weather forecasts to commodity prices. It can also strengthen efficiency along the supply chain by facilitating transportation, monitoring logistics tracking, and improving the link between commodity exchanges, traders, buyers, and sellers. One successful example of ICT in agribusiness supply chain tracking and monitoring is the Esoko Ghana Commodity Index, or EGCI, a rural communication platform that disseminates commodity price information to farmers over mobile phones. Every week, EGCI publishes a cash-market price index for physical commodities, tracking prices at the wholesale and retail levels. Access to real-time market information, including both pricing and demand, helps farmers to choose the most attractive market and negotiate with traders. Not only has it benefited smallholders, with early evaluations showing increases of 30 to 40 percent in income for those who use it, but it has also created new jobs in the ICT sector in Ghana and the nine other African countries it has expanded to since it launched in 2005. Mobile technology is also helping to advance animal husbandry. Kenya-based iCow is a mobile application specifically targeted toward smallholder farmers raising dairy cows. Through iCow, farmers receive reminders on vital days of their cows’ pregnancies, allowing them to optimize milk collection. They can also get contact information for nearby veterinarians, maintain and update electronic records for their cows, and access tips on animal care. Early evaluations show that the program is producing positive results: 42 percent of farmers who joined in September 2010 reported increased incomes by January 2012, and 56 percent of those saw incomes rise due to increased milk yields ranging from 1.5 to 3 liters per lactating animal. Despite these early achievements, however, ICT boasts few runaway successes. Several projects, created to address local problems, were built without commercial viability or sustainability in mind. As such, they remain sub-scale and in pilot mode. To harness the power of ICT innovations and achieve scale, we must acknowledge where innovation is needed, locate sufficient financing, and design solutions that can grow and be applied flexibly. Exploiting ICT’s full potential for rural development is a discussion for all stakeholders, including investors, donors, developers, practitioners, regulators, and most importantly, farmers. It will sometimes require difficult tradeoffs between directing resources toward narrowly tailored solutions and toward the broader development of technology platforms. In this context, a long-term perspective will best help ICT deliver on its promise for agricultural development and poverty reduction in Africa.

Yesterday I published a post on my blog, Democracy in Development, about the food crisis in Africa’s Sahel and the political instability in Mali. I discuss the need for both immediate aid and longer-term solutions to bolster food security. As I note: Already, some 18 million people in the Sahel region are confronting a severe food shortage. The hunger crisis is most immediately tied to inadequate rainfall, small crop yields, and high food prices, but conflict makes the situation all the more severe. You can read the full post here.

This is a guest post by Owen Cylke. Mr. Cylke is a development professional and a retired senior foreign service officer with USAID. In his post, he discusses the CAADP meeting in Nairobi in early May, and agriculture’s future role in development. In a related development, the White House recently announced a new U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa, a strategy underscoring the role of agriculture in spurring economic growth, trade, and investment. One of the more interesting themes emerging from the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) meeting in Nairobi on May 3-4 was that directed to the developmental role for agriculture. To date, CAADP has focused largely on production and productivity, but increasingly broader ideas associated with structural change, economic transition, and transformation are entering the discussion. The notion of a developmental role for agriculture is centered on a process where agriculture, through higher productivity, provides food, labor, and even savings to the processes of industrialization and urbanization. The impulse for the introduction of this new discussion in Africa can be discerned in the development outlook of African heads of state, analysis of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), advocacy of the African Union Commission (AUC), and program initiative of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Respectively, statements include: • African heads of state: “Adoption of a new strategic approach…effecting the desired paradigm shift from management of poverty…to economic transformation” – African Union Summit, 2010 • AUC and UNECA: “Governing development in Africa – the role of the state in economic transformation” – African Economic Outlook, 2011 • NEPAD: “Emphasizing the rural sector and its role in the development process, articulating a shared vision for its future, and putting forward an integrated framework for action in support of rural transformation as a key factor for national and regional development” – Rural Futures Programme, 2011 The imperative underlying this new direction is underscored by the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world whose economy is still defined by its rural character and agricultural dependence. It is a region that will have to address the challenges of structural change and economic transformation in the face of an unachieved demographic transition in the context of a global open economy and under the constraints of climate change. The analytic support for this sobering assessment and related outlook are best and most recently laid out by the internationally supported RuralStruc Program of the World Bank (Bruno Losch, Task Team Leader). The CAADP meeting opens the door to the further elaboration of NEPAD’s implementation plan for Rural Futures, organized as it is around the idea of transformation as proposed by African heads of state. Of course, that work should be seen as the logical extension of CAADP, not as an alternative or in contradiction with it. And its elaboration will be dependent on the development of an international consensus around the ideas, goals, and approaches to structural change, economic transition, and transformation.

This is a guest post by Jim Sanders, a career, now retired, West Africa watcher for various federal agencies. The views expressed below are his personal views and do not reflect those of his former employers. Returning from an early autumn vacation in Acadia National Park last year, we exited I-95 near Waterville, Maine to grab a Starbucks coffee at a nearby mall. Seeking a second opinion on my theory that the Subaru station-wagon was the state car of Maine, I approached a total stranger who was climbing out of his Toyota Prius. After affirming that, in fact, he had owned one himself, the man identified himself as Dr. David Austin, a local physician. He also mentioned his upcoming tour in Djibouti, as a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontiers, or MSF) physician, and explained that he had previously served in Sudan (Darfur) and Congo. Having recently returned from the four-month tour with MSF in Djibouti, Dr. Austin was eager to speak about his experiences there. He worked in a tent hospital in the capital, which focused on treating malnourished children. Mortality is particularly high in that segment of the population. (In Djibouti, MSF expected a large refugee influx, but the flow of refugees into Djibouti failed to materialize, and so it developed a program specifically for malnourished children.) The government of Djibouti had borrowed substantially from the World Bank to create a Center of Excellence facility, intended to address the problem of child malnourishment, but while the structure was built, it did not become operational. MSF, whose mission centers on providing aid in emergencies, eventually began to close down their tent hospital. A handover to another institution never occurred, yet every month, Dr. Austin said, more kids appeared needing treatment. "On paper," he said, "the government treats malnourished children, but in reality many children do not get treated." Yet, as in his other African assignments, Dr. Austin felt buoyed by the people themselves, having previously remarked that, "There is a strong spirit of joyfulness in many Africans that I consider priceless." Djibouti’s slums are worse than India’s, he explained, where the poor hammer out tin cans and make nice shacks, and sweep the areas around them to keep them clean. In Djibouti, in contrast, the poor live in rag tents, amidst a sea of garbage. "If your child dies, MSF will provide you a ride home, with your dead child," Austin explained. "I went with one family [to take their deceased child home], driving forever through slums, until we reached a shack in the middle of nowhere." But despite their circumstances, the people are "lovely, eager to talk, and full of energy." "There’s a lot going on," he noted. Not least, a mini-Arab Spring, which has prompted a heavy-handed government reaction.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said last week "The truth is that there is very little attention to the crisis in the Sahel. Most of the focus of the international committee has been on the Syria crisis." True enough. UN agencies and other organizations have been sounding the alarm that a devil’s brew of food insecurity, water scarcity, environmental degradation and conflict is likely to lead to a humanitarian disaster in one of the poorest parts of the world. Anthony Lake, the Executive Director of UNICEF estimates that some 15 million people are effected by drought, of whom 1.5 million are children. UN agencies have appealed to the international community for $724 million, but only fifty percent of this amount has been pledged. With respect to international attention to the Sahel, the international community pays more attention to the political crisis in Mali or alleged international terrorist links with indigenous groups than it does to hunger. The UN has issued a wake-up call. It remains to be seen if the international community will respond soon enough.