Outside a village in the Dasenech district of southern Ethiopia, a queue has formed in front of a narrow bench beneath a tree, where clerks are checking documents and handing out packets of banknotes, each worth about 4,500 Ethiopian birr (£76).
The distribution is being overseen by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian organisation based in the US. Kulo Arikulo, like others in the queue, says the support has come just in time.
Her family owned 50 head of cattle and 80 goats, but four consecutive failed rainy seasons have dried up rivers and the pastureland has turned to dust. Most of the herd died from thirst, and the few surviving animals were sold to buy food.
When that money ran out, she collected leaves, roots and seeds to feed her six children, but she says these are becoming harder to find. “The last four years we couldn’t harvest anything, so this money is helping our family to survive,” Arikulo says.
The people in this little queue are among the 36 million people left facing hunger by the drought gripping the Horn of Africa, where more than 8.9 million livestock across the region have died in one of the region’s worst climate-related emergencies of the past 40 years.
In addition, it has happened at a time when aid funding is also drying up: according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia, just $850m (£750m) has been pledged of the $1.66bn the UN says is needed to respond to drought in the country. Heaping yet more pressure on communities are soaring food prices and the Covid pandemic.
Oxfam predicts hunger will kill one person every 36 seconds in east Africa between now and the end of the year “as the worst-hit areas hurtle towards famine”. Francesco Rocca, the president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, has labelled the failure of donors to release funds as “morally unacceptable”.
“People have been going through one shock after another,” says Frank McManus, the IRC’s country director for Ethiopia. “We’ve already had four rainy seasons fail and there’s a real possibility the next season and the one after that could fail too.”
Governments and humanitarian organisations in east Africa are increasingly using the relatively new aid concept of giving cash, so that people can buy what they need, rather than in-kind aid, such as sacks of rice and bottles of oil, which brings its own problems of distribution and impacts local markets. Sometimes cash is provided in the form of vouchers that can only be spent on certain items.
Cash transfers became more frequent during the Covid pandemic. In 2020, as countries locked down, the number of people receiving money or voucher-based assistance increased by 240%, to about 1.1 billion people – 14% of the global population – according to the World Bank.
That year cash and vouchers worth $6bn accounted for about 19% of global humanitarian aid, up from less than 1% in 2004.
Last year Kenya introduced a cash-transfer scheme to help people affected by the dry conditions, and Niger is piloting a similar programme.
McManus says cash is faster and more efficient than distributing food and medicine to beneficiaries. “If you do traditional in-kind aid, you have to buy the materials, truck them to where they are needed and hire warehouses to store them,” he says. “Whereas with cash, there’s a lot less supply chain costs.”
Michel Saad, the head OCHA Ethiopia, says it means people can buy from local traders, helping money circulate, but crucially also provides “more dignity” for those in need, compared with the traditional sack of grain.
“Communities know what they need better than humanitarian actors,” Saad says. “So when we give cash, it’s allowing them to be in charge of their own personal lives and say, ‘We believe we need to address this problem or that problem.’ Basically, it’s putting people at the centre.”
The 1,320 beneficiaries of the IRC’s programme in Dasenech, close to Ethiopia’s borders with South Sudan and Kenya, are due to receive a total of 13,500 Ethiopian birr over three monthly instalments.
Those in the queue say they have just received their second tranche of cash. They spent most of the first on food and medicine, paying back loans from neighbours, and helping other members of their community.
“Before, we were surviving by eating leaves that we collected far from our village. It was a desperate situation,” says Godi Arimere, who spent part of her first instalment taking one of her children to a clinic when they became sick.
Others says the support has simply helped them feed their families at a time when their children have been going hungry. But Arimere is worried about what awaits her family when the programme finishes. “After that, what is our fate?” she asks.
“Ideally, we would be doing cash-transfer programmes that last much longer than three months,” says McManus. “But we have limited resources. The humanitarian response to the drought in Ethiopia is hugely underfunded.”
