Aid promised to Ethiopia undelivered

" The Ethiopian government and humanitarian organizations have expressed concern about the slow donor response to the drought crisis in the Horn of Africa nation, where nutrition and water needs are severely under-funded. "On the non-food items, around 82 percent is still missing," said Wodayehu Belew, fundraising team leader for the Ethiopian government's Department of Prevention and Preparedness Agency (DPPA). "This is worrying–even more so considering it is now four months since we made our appeal to the donors." In January, the government, the United Nations and other aid agencies appealed for $166 million in emergency food and non-food assistance to help 2.6 million Ethiopians. However, only $19 million of the $111 million earmarked for health and nutrition and water and sanitation has been received so far. According to the UN, at least 1.7 million Ethiopians are struggling to survive, with limited access to water in the eastern Somali region and in the southern Borena zone. About one in five children in southeastern Ethiopia is malnourished, and two out of every 10,000 die every day, making the need for therapeutic feeding and water access extremely urgent, according to Paul Hebert, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Ethiopia. "We have already identified critical malnutrition rates in the Somali region, with 20 percent of malnourished children. If resources are not made available quickly, we will be unable to feed them and we fear that children might start to die," Hebert said. "If we don't receive new funding quickly, it might jeopardize the whole crisis in the region." Measles and diarrhea–which infect weakened children who have no access to clean water–are the main killers during a drought. In the last major drought in 2000, one-fifth of all deaths of children under the age of five were measles-related, according to the UN. At least 34 people have died of measles in eastern Ethiopia over the last six months. The food-relief situation does not look good, according to the DPPA and OCHA. Food pipelines will be full only until the end of May, and no new contributions have been announced. "The available stock of food has already been nearly totally distributed. Unless we get new funding, we don't know," said Wodayehu from the DPPA. "We need more support from the donor community if we want to keep the current crisis under control." "It is worrying that you never get anything [funding] until kids start dying in huge numbers," said Bjorn Ljunqvist, head of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Ethiopia. UNICEF lacks nearly 50 percent of the $10 million urgently needed for additional emergency water tankers and the vaccination of some 1.5 million children against measles. "If the rain doesn't come in adequate amounts, there are a lot of signs that the crisis will spill to the north, that the 1.7 million will jump to 2.5 or three million." "We don't have precise figures yet, but we expect the needs to increase a lot," OCHA's Hebert said. The UN has provided $1.7 million to the World Health Organization through its newly created Central Emergency Response Fund to be used to provide aid to the Horn of Africa region, of which Ethiopia will receive $350,000 for life-saving programs. An estimated 11 million people in the Horn of Africa are facing severe food shortages as a result of several failed rainy seasons.