The drought ravaging parts of Kenya has been declared a national disaster by President Uhuru Kenyatta – a month after the National Drought Management Authority said an estimated 2.1 million Kenyans face acute food shortages and would be in urgent need of assistance in the next six months. This number has risen by more than 600,000 people from the 1.4 million said to be facing hunger due to the drought and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Kenya Red Cross Society’s Secretary General, Asha Mohammed, has said that twelve arid and semi-arid counties are the most affected.
In 2020, with the help of local and national authorities in Kenya, the World Food Programme (WFP) began rolling out aid for more than 400,000 urban poor in Covid-19 hotspots.
