Faye Callagan, IFRC, in Johannesburg
Saray Amadou has ten children and no way to feed them. Her husband is away, the rains have not come and there is no food to harvest.
She spends her day in a field gathering the few grains of millet she can find on the ground – grains others have dropped or that have blown in from another field.
After six hours carrying out this back-breaking search for food, she sifts out the twigs and dried grass and is left with a few handfuls of grain – at least it is something and her children will have a mouthful of food before going to bed.
Aid distributions haven’t yet reached her village in the remote province of Zinder, southern Niger, so one meal a day is all she can hope for. Some days, she won’t eat herself so there is enough for her children.
But there is hope. The Red Cross Society of Niger is distributing food in 385 locations to help the most vulnerable families affected by the recent drought. Supported by the IFRC, which has recently trebled its appeal, the local Red Cross committees are also providing seeds to ensure a better harvest next year and are running cash programmes to enable families to buy food from the market.
The Red Cross approach aims to meet people’s emergency food needs now and in the future, by trying to minimize the impact of a future crisis. The cash-for-work programmes focus on improved agricultural activities and small-scale irrigation projects, so the community benefits twice. They receive a small income and they build resilience to the devastating effects of nature.
For now, Saray is surviving. She hopes the rains will come soon so the crops will grow again. Her dream is that she may wake up in the morning and know that her children will not go to bed hungry yet again.
The drought is affecting half of Niger’s population of 14 million, with children under five suffering the most. Many are now in the stages of acute malnutrition as their small bodies struggle to survive on the limited amount of food available to them and their mothers.
On 29 June, the IFRC launched a revised appeal for 3.6 million Swiss francs (3.3 million US dollars, 2.7 million euros) to provide vital support to 385,000 people in Niger who are suffering from food shortages, more than 50,000 of them children.