Today, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced the United States is providing nearly $524 million in critical humanitarian assistance for the Horn of Africa crisis, at the “High-level Pledging Event to Support the Humanitarian Response in the Horn of Africa.” This includes $416 million in USAID funding and nearly $108 million from the Department of State. The impacts of the current drought – the most severe in the Horn of Africa in recorded history – continues to leave 23 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia facing grave hunger.
The additional funding announced today will enable USAID partners to provide emergency food, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene assistance, and other critical assistance for the most vulnerable populations across the region. This latest contribution comes as households cope with the compounding effects of five failed rainy seasons across the span of more than two years.
We are concerned that extremely high levels of humanitarian need will persist throughout the Horn, given current conditions and insufficient financial support from key humanitarian donors that is not commensurate with the scale of the crisis. Even if rainy seasons return to normal in the region in 2023, recovery from a drought of this magnitude will take years, with substantial donor funding needed to rebuild livelihoods and community resilience.
The United States has acted early and aggressively to respond to the drought in the region in an attempt to avert Famine, and remains the largest single-country donor of humanitarian assistance in the Horn of Africa, providing more than $1.4 billion across the region since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2023. But, more funding is desperately needed. We again call on all donors – both traditional and emerging – to join us in dramatically scaling up humanitarian assistance to deliver desperately needed aid and save millions of lives, and to make longer term investments that will improve the ability of communities to better withstand future climate shocks.
