Geneva: The lives of half a million children in the Horn of Africa are at risk, according to international aid agencies, as the worst drought in decades forces thousands of people to flee their homes each day.
High food prices and the driest years since the early 1950s have pushed many poor families in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti into desperate need, Unicef said.

"We have over two million children who are malnourished. Half a million of these children are in a life-threatening condition at this stage — a 50 per cent increase over 2009 figures," Unicef spokesman Marixie Mercado told a news briefing.
Child malnutrition rates in some camps are at least 45 per cent, triple the emergency threshold, Mercado said. Child mortality rates are also very high.
"At one camp in Ethiopia it is above the emergency threshold of four deaths per 10,000 children per day and that is also the case in the Turkana district of Kenya," she said.

Unicef has appealed for $31.9 million (Dh117.1 million) to help treat seriously malnourished children across the region over the next three months. It plans to set up child immunisation campaigns, especially against measles which can be deadly in unvaccinated children, and provide safe water and better sanitation.
The number of people in need of food assistance across the Horn of Africa is expected to rise to 10 million from previous forecasts of six million, the World Food Programme said.

This is putting pressure on the UN agency's $477 million budget for the region, already facing a shortfall of 40 per cent.
In Ethiopia, the WFP anticipates 3.5 million people will be hit by the drought and anticipates an equal number of people to have been affected in Kenya by August.




Spiralling food costs
There, the cost of a 90 kg bag of maize rose 160 per cent year-on-year in June to $44, it said.
Drought and fighting have also put about 2.85 million people — a third of Somalia's population — in need of humanitarian assistance, WFP spokesman Emilia Casella said.

Earlier this week, Al Shabab, which controls central and southern Somalia, lifted a ban on humanitarian agencies supplying food aid to millions of Somalis, which had pushed increasing numbers across the border in search of relief.
Since January 54,000 Somalis have fled into Ethiopia, with more than 1,700 people crossing daily in recent weeks, piling pressure on makeshift camps struggling to handle the inflow. In neighbouring Kenya, some 1,400 Somalis are arriving every day.

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