Horn of Africa drought drives 22 million to hunger - in pictures

An area encompassing southern Ethiopia to northern Kenya and Somalia is at risk of hunger owing to the worst drought in four decades

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  The UN says 12 million people in Ethiopia, 5.6 million in Somalia and 4.3 million in Kenya are 'acutely food insecure' after years of drought. All photos: Eduardo Soteras / AFP

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  The region's people, many of them herders and subsistence farmers, are enduring their fifth consecutive poor rainy season

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  The UN says 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes by a lack of water and pasture

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  The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, and extreme weather events are occurring with increased frequency and intensity

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  Eight of the 13 past rainy seasons have brought below average rainfall, according to the Climate Hazards Centre in the US

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  That has brought hardship for millions

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  The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, when 260,000 people - half of them children under the age of six - died of hunger, partly because the international community did not act fast enough, says the UN

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  Crops were ravaged by a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021. They have since been wiped out, while livestock has also suffered

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  UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimated in November that 9.5 million cattle had died

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  The war in Ukraine has contributed to soaring food and fuel costs, disrupted global supply chains and diverted aid money away from the region

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  Somalia has been hit hardest, with the drought affecting more than half of its population - about 7.85 million people

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  In December, OCHA said the nation was not yet in the grip of full-blown famine thanks to the response of aid agencies and local communities

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  But people were nevertheless suffering "catastrophic" food shortages, it said, and if assistance was not scaled up, famine could be expected in southern Somalia as soon as April

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  Rural people in Baidoa and Burhakaba districts, and displaced people in Baidoa town and the capital Mogadishu were most at risk

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  OCHA said that by June, the number of people at risk of starvation was expected to more than triple to 727,000 from October

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  According to the UN children's agency Unicef, almost two million children across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of hunger

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  It said in September that 730 children had died between January and July in nutrition centres in Somalia, but that the real numbers were likely to be much higher

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  Lacking water, milk and food, and often living in squalid conditions, the youngest become so weak they are vulnerable to diseases such as measles and cholera

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  Unicef said 2.7 million children had stopped going to school

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  'There is no end in sight for the hunger crisis and hope is slowly fizzling out,' said Xavier Joubert, Ethiopia director for the British charity Save the Children

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  'There's no doubt that the need has grown to an enormous scale,' he said, in an urgent call for funding

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  Only 55.5 percent of the $5.9 billion sought by the UN to tackle the crisis has been provided

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  Early humanitarian action averted a famine in Somalia in 2017

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