US first lady Jill Biden on Sunday visited drought-affected communities in Kenya and appealed for wealthy nations to give more as the Horn of Africa suffers its driest conditions in decades.
Biden concluded her two-nation tour of Africa by calling for a greater spotlight on the record-breaking drought which threatens 22 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia with starvation.
The US has funded the lion's share of the aid budget for the disaster which has killed millions of livestock and destroyed crops.
“We cannot be the only ones. We have to have other countries join us in this global effort to help these people of the region,” said Ms Biden at a relief point in Kajiado, a bone-dry county south of Nairobi.
“Unfortunately, you know there is the war in Ukraine. There is the earthquake in Turkey. I mean there are a lot of competing interests but obviously here … people are starving.”
Ms Biden heard from parents struggling to feed their children and communities unable to source enough water after five consecutive failed rainy seasons.
The drought was a key focus of Ms Biden's visit to Kenya, with another engagement looking at food security and farming in a changing climate.
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Ms Biden is visiting Namibia and Kenya this week as the White House seeks improved economic partnership with Africa. AFP -
US first lady Jill Biden with Namibian President Hage Geingob at the State House in Windhoek, Namibia, on February 22, 2023. AP -
Ms Biden with Namibia's first lady Monica Geingos. AP -
Ms Biden attends a wreath-laying ceremony at Heroes' Acre in Windhoek. AP -
Ms Biden is in the country as part of a commitment by President Joe Biden to deepen US engagement with the region. AP -
Heroes' Acre is one of Namibia's official war memorials. AFP -
Mr Geingob welcomes Ms Biden at the State House in Windhoek. AFP -
Ms Biden is accompanied by her granddaughter Naomi Biden. AFP -
Another view of the wreath-laying ceremony at Heroes’ Acre. Reuters -
Ms Geingos with the Bidens' granddaughter Naomi. Reuters -
The last high-level US official to visit Namibia was vice president Al Gore in 1996, the White House said. AP -
The US has fallen behind China in investment in sub-Saharan Africa, a key battleground in an increasingly fraught competition between the major powers. AFP -
Ms Biden's visit highlights the challenges facing women and young people and the food insecurity plaguing the continent. AFP -
After flying all night, the first lady and her granddaughter were feted at the airport by members of some of Namibia’s ethnic groups. Reuters -
It is Ms Biden's sixth visit to Africa, but her first as first lady. Reuters
But the 71-year-old community college professor also met women and youth leaders, toured an informal settlement and laid a wreath for those killed in the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi.
Her visit to Kenya and before that Namibia aims to build on the US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington late last year where President Joe Biden said his country was “all in” on the hotly-courted continent.
Africa has become a renewed diplomatic battleground following Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year and Jill Biden's visit was the first by a senior White House official to the continent since her husband came to power.
In Namibia, Ms Biden said the US was committed to helping African nations get a louder voice at the UN and other international bodies.
Drought in the Horn of Africa — in pictures
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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 -
The region's people, many of them herders and subsistence farmers, are enduring their fifth consecutive poor rainy season -
The UN says 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes by a lack of water and pasture -
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 -
Eight of the 13 past rainy seasons have brought below average rainfall, according to the Climate Hazards Centre in the US -
That has brought hardship for millions -
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 -
Crops were ravaged by a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021. They have since been wiped out, while livestock has also suffered -
UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimated in November that 9.5 million cattle had died -
The war in Ukraine has contributed to soaring food and fuel costs, disrupted global supply chains and diverted aid money away from the region -
Somalia has been hit hardest, with the drought affecting more than half of its population - about 7.85 million people -
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 -
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 -
Rural people in Baidoa and Burhakaba districts, and displaced people in Baidoa town and the capital Mogadishu were most at risk -
OCHA said that by June, the number of people at risk of starvation was expected to more than triple to 727,000 from October -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Unicef said 2.7 million children had stopped going to school -
'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 -
'There's no doubt that the need has grown to an enormous scale,' he said, in an urgent call for funding -
Only 55.5 percent of the $5.9 billion sought by the UN to tackle the crisis has been provided -
Early humanitarian action averted a famine in Somalia in 2017
