Video: Kenya and Somalia

We were in the Horn of Africa last week, northern tip of Kenya and Somalia, and those people are really up against it. They have got absolutely nothing. It hasn’t rained for over a year – there’s not a blade of grass or leaf left on a tree – and all their animals are starving to death. They’re not famers as we know it, they don’t have any land or grow any crops, they just keep animals . Mostly sheep and goats (and a few cows and camels) with donkeys to carry everything on as they move around searching for pasture.

They’re nomads – the animals are their culture, their past and their future – their very way of life.

But this drought has probably killed sixty to seventy per cent of the livestock, and many people have lost everything, and are starting to starve themselves.

Then they “drop-out” of the nomadic way of life and end up in miserable villages, in little round huts surrounded by rubbish and squalor – with nothing. No animals, no future.

If they’re lucky they get handouts of food from aid agencies – but their misery and hopelessness goes on and on. There are people in these camps that we met in 2006 – still dependent on handouts. What sort of life is that – and what sort of sense does that make for us in the west who pay for it.

So SPANA has been campaigning for the international aid agencies to wake up to the idea that these animals are vital to the people – and if we invest just a tiny amount – maybe just one or two per cent of the amount spent on human feed – to keep a nucleus of animals going, so that when the rains come again, these people can take up their lives and be independent and free again. And we wouldn’t need to keep on feeding them forever.

We have a feeding programme there already, just as we did five years ago, to keep some animals alive, and show that it can be done, and just what such a programme could achieve.

We took a group of British journalists out with us to see for themselves the misery of these poor people – they were quickly convinced, and their articles have strongly backed SPANA’s campaign.

So, perhaps it doesn’t matter very much if it’s raining outside, and it’s still a week before we get paid.

You could be in Somalia.

Jeremy Hulme

SPANA Chief Executive