Gates Foundation gave $1.6 million grant for food crisis in Ethiopia and Somalia

The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday announced a $2.5 million grant to Mercy Corps to fund relief and longer-term recovery efforts in drought-stricken Wajir County on Kenya's border with Somalia.

The grant is a dramatic boost to the Portland-based Mercy Corps assistance in the region, and amounts to more than 40 percent of the $5.4 million in private funds that Mercy Corps has raised to date for Horn of Africa relief efforts.

Though the current drought affects some 13 million people, the private-sector fundraising has fallen far-below Mercy Corps fundraising for the 2010 Haitian earthquake, when the organization raised $18.8 million in private funds and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, when it raised $11.2 million.

"The needs are huge but this has been a tough one to raise money for," said Joy Portella, a Mercy Corps spokeswoman in Seattle. She said the organization also has received support in the Horn of Africa region from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Also on Tuesday, the Gates Foundation announced a $1.6 million grant to International Medical Corps to provide emergency food assistance and to help improve health, hygiene and sanitation in northern Somalia and eastern Ethiopia.

The Gates grant to Mercy Corps will finance food vouchers to enable families to purchase food supplies for themselves and livestock, and also will help fund longer-term efforts to support the livestock-based economy and diversify it to make it more resilient against future droughts.

On Tuesday, U.S. Agency for International Development Director Rajiv Shah discussed the Horn of Africa aid effort at the Federal Way headquarters of World Vision.

Shah, who has visited the region, said there are now 490,000 people at a Dadaab refugee camp in southern Kenya, which was designed to hold about 80,000 people. He said some 1,500 people join the camp every day.

"These women and children, many of whom I had a chance to speak with, have walked 70, 80, even 100 kilometers, often with children in their arms to come for safety, for food, for medicine," Shah said in his Tuesday speech.

"I met a woman in this line who actually had to choose which of her children to carry, because she couldn't take both. These are the kinds of things that we need more Americans to see, because we know that when Americans see this they react quite strongly," Shah said, according to a transcript of his speech released by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com