Members of the Turkana community plough a dry field as they prepare to grow sorghum near Lodwar, Kenya, in 2019. Save the Children says that 3.5 million people in Kenya are short of food this year. All photos: AFP
People displaced by Ethiopia's drought walk at a camp for displaced people in Werder. The Somali people of Ethiopia's sout-heast have a name for the drought that has killed livestock, dried up wells and forced hundreds of thousands into camps: sima, which means "equalised". It's an appropriate name, they say, because this drought has left no person untouched, spared no corner of their arid region. And it has forced 7.8 million people across Ethiopia to rely on emergency food handouts to stay alive.
Mothers wait for food relief and health services at Tawkal 2 Dinsoor camp for internally displaced people in Baidoa, Somalia, in February. Insufficient rainfall since late 2020 has come as a fatal blow to populations already suffering from a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hawa Mohamed Isack, 60, drinks water at Muuri, one of the 500 camps for internally displaced people, in Baidoa. For several weeks, humanitarian organisations have multiplied alerts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, which raises fears of a tragedy similar to that of 2011, the last famine that killed 260,000 people in Somalia.
Bulley Hassanow Alliyow,30, gives water to her child at Tawkal 2 Dinsoor camp for internally displaced people in Baidoa.
Desperate, hungry and thirsty, more and more people are flocking to Baidoa from rural areas of southern Somalia.
Somalia is one of the countries hardest hit by the drought that is engulfing the Horn of Africa.
People wait for water with containers at a camp, in Baidoa.
A field worked by Othman Cheikh Idriss, 60, a Sudanese farmer, in the capital Khartoum's district of Jureif Gharb.
