CARE in Africa
1) Can you outline what your job entails?
Raising funds for and advising our projects in Africa on how they can address hunger at a local level; and drawing on this experience to lobbying for changes to enable better – earlier, more appropriate and better coordinated – responses to food crises in the future.
2) Which areas of Africa are most vulnerable to hunger/famine and approximately how many people are affected?
Parts of southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Sahel (which includes Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso) are affected by cyclical food emergencies and have large numbers of people living in chronic poverty.
More than 120 million people are living on the edge of emergency. They struggle to find enough food even in ‘good’ years, and live with high incidence of disease, low or little income and gradually depleting essential possessions
These people have no reserves to shield them from a drought, flood or any shock that disrupts their often fragile livelihoods.
3) What are the root causes of hunger in Africa?
A number of social, economic, environmental and political factors keep people poor and hungry, including inequality, lack of opportunities to earn money, conflict, HIV and climate change. They differ in influence from case to case, but the common result is that they prevent people from making enough money to accumulate essential goods, savings or livestock to fall back on in times of crisis, and means they will struggle to find enough to eat even in a ‘good’ year.
A shift in the global food system has exacerbated that, with demand growing faster than supply. Crop production is decreasing, the land now growing biofuels and animal feed instead. Industrialised countries are moving away from agriculture and climate change is reducing the productivity of much rain-fed land. At the same time, steady population growth is producing more mouths to feed and consumption patterns are expanding and changing.
This affects everyone, but for families who already spend the vast majority of a tiny income on food ( many of the people CARE works with spend up to 80 per cent of their income on food), this can be what pushes them over the edge from hunger to starvation.
Typically, the first response to an emergency is to provide food aid, and while food aid is often necessary, it only addresses the symptom of the emergency – hunger – and fails to address the real reasons for the crisis. In fact with food emergencies, the cause of the immediate emergency is often not a food shortage, but rather people’s lack of money to buy food. Introducing food aid can add to the problem by distorting local markets: driving food prices up, out of reach of the poorest; or driving prices down, leaving farmers with poor prices for their harvest.
Other forms of food aid, such as Monetised food are yet more problematic. Shipped from the US to developing countries, it is given to charities to sell to raise cash for poverty fighting programs. But, this means the food reaches only those who can afford it, not the very poorest people and can harm local farmers by competing with their crops. It hurts the very people it is supposed to help, and it is inefficient- with up to 25 per cent spent on packaging and delivery of food.
That’s why CARE has turned down £23 million of this American monetised food aid. But we need to fill this cash gap for our programmes to boost local production and deal with the underlying problems such as poverty, HIV and climate change and supporting local economies instead.
CARE has been working in Africa for over 40 years, addressing issues ranging from soaring HIV and AIDS rates to empowering women and improving agricultural production.
CARE works with hundreds of communities in Africa, particularly in areas prone to food emergency, to ensure that they have enough to eat year-round. Millions of the poorest Africans rely on subsistance agriculture or animal-herding, and supporting their livelihoods and helping them to protect the natural resources they rely on is a crucial part of CARE’s work. Some of the work we do includes training farmers in improved techniques, building small reservoirs or irrigation systems, supplying seeds and tools, and access to vetinerary services for animals and markets for their produce. Our projects help rural families grow more food, in a long-term, sustainable way, as well as addressing the other factors that impact production and trap people in poverty – such as conflict, climate change and HIV.
When flood or drought does strike, we act early to mitigate the worst of the impact, and we stay with the communities to help them recover and pull themselves away from the edge of the next emergency
6) Do you have any advice for anyone interested in helping?
Of course donations are absolutely essential to our work. You can also do your bit by supporting Fair Trade companies who offer farmers and local traders a fair price and new markets for their produce. If anyone is feeling inspired to go even further, a CARE Challenge event is ideal- there are a wide range of challenges to choose from so if you’ve done one, why not try another. You can raise huge amounts of money through sponsorship and mobilising your friends and colleagues. These events are great- they spread CARE’s message at the same time as raising much-needed funds. We’re always enormously grateful to those fantastic people who make the effort.