Tearfund and partners are working in Africa’s western Sahel region which is experiencing a major food crisis as a result of the locust invasion and drought last year. As many as 3.6 million people are facing severe food shortages in the region including 150,000 children that are suffering from severe malnutrition.
The most critical areas are across Niger where Tearfund have a team assessing the need with partner organisation Jemed. Tearfund emergency grants enable local churches in the region to help remote villages, building contacts in the communities to gain important local knowledge of the unfolding crisis.
Building low dykes in the Sahel desert.
Within nomadic tribes, the Tuareg and Woodabe, people rely on moving between pasturelands with their cattle. Their way of life is under threat with increasing desertification as a result of climate change. The drought last year is a clear indication of this and Jemed is well placed to respond – working to enable the Tuareg to survive in their historic homeland by helping them adapt to a changing climate. Tearfund's latest harvest church pack, Sahel, meets the Tuareg tribe and looks at how they've worked with Jemed to respond to the demands of a changing landscape. You can find out more about the pack by clicking here.
Jemed Director, Jeff Woodke, says:
“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.”
There have been eight serious droughts in the past 20 years. Now, the nomadic cattle herders are reeling from the effects of an influx of farmers from the south, who have reduced semi-arid pastureland to dust. A locust invasion, together with sandstorms, has destroyed the little pasture that was left. Through an emergency Tearfund grant, Jemed is giving out animal feed and providing trucks so farmers can take their animals to market in southern Niger and look for better places for them to graze.
Hamad Almomin, an 80-year-old Tuareg chief, adds:
“There have been huge changes in the life of the nomad. The heavy rains we once had have disappeared. Now the rains are sparse.”
There is an old Tuareg proverb that says, ‘When the music changes, then the rhythm of the dance must change also.’
Jemed has created ‘fixation points’ for the Tuareg people, where they can find a water well, a grain bank and send their children to school, and these grain banks have now run out. People only have two or three weeks’ supply of grain left in their homes.
In some parts of Niger, people are surviving on a diet of leaves, mixed with a small amount of flour. Malnutrition rates among children have doubled from the same time a year ago. People without any option are now moving all over the country to look for food.
Another Tearfund partner, the Union of Protestant Evangelical Churches in Niger, (UEEPN), runs community grain banks in southern Niger. These grain banks will help provide villagers with a supply of grain during the ‘hunger gap’ that comes before the harvest. Currently 20 villages have UEEPN grain stores that are managed by elected village committees.