Leading UK Relief Agency Fights Poverty in Africa amid Droughts

Tearfund, one of the UK’s leading relief and development agencies committed to fighting poverty, has recently been carrying out extensive works with its partners in Africa’s western Sahel region. The area is currently experiencing a severe food shortage due to locust invasions and a drought last year, and now as many as 3.2 million people are facing a food crisis. Among them, more than 150,000 children have been reported to be suffering from severe malnutrition.

Tearfund currently has sent a team across the Niger region to assess the desperate needs in cooperation with partner organisation Jemed.

Emergency grants from the Tearfund have enabled local churches in the region to help aid relief efforts by gaining local knowledge of the crisis as it unfolds in remote villages.

The Sahel region is a place that has been terribly affected by climate change. Historically nomadic tribes move between pasturelands with their cattle, but environmental stresses have meant that this way of life is very much under threat by increasing desertification.

The 2004 drought has been a stark eye-opener of this, and the director of Jemed, Jeff Woodke said, "There is some pasture for animals, but there are very few animals. The climate has been acting strangely. Livestock that survived the drought have been caught in flash flooding. The problem right now is the deficit of cereal, leaving a ‘hunger gap’ until the harvest in late September. One sack of millet, the staple food, now costs half a month’s income – that is the equivalent to a cow or three sheep. People can’t afford anything anymore."

Tearfund report that over the past twenty years there have now been eight serious droughts in the region, and to add further pressure to the already strained lands, a huge influx of farmers from the south have moved north.

Sandstorms, locust invasions have also added to the plight of the African region. In response, through a Tearfund grant, Jemed has been able to hand out animal feed and also provided trucks so farmers can take their animals to markets in southern Niger in efforts to find better grazing lands.

An 80-year-old Tuareg chief, Hamad Almomin told Tearfund, "There have been huge changes in the life of the nomad. The heavy rains we once had have disappeared. Now the rains are sparse."

The Union of Protestant Evangelical Churches in Niger (UEEPN), another Tearfund partner, has been running community grain banks in southern Niger to provide villagers with a supply of grain during the period before the harvest. Currently 20 villages have UEEPN grain stores managed by elected village communities.

To donate to Tearfund please visit www.tearfund.org/Giving