Addis Ababa - The Ethiopian government on Monday disclosed that the provision of humanitarian assistance was well under way, targeting some 6.4 million drought-affected people in parts of Ethiopia.
Mitiku Kassa, the commissioner of Ethiopia's National Disaster Risk Management Commission, noted that the support was being provided by the Ethiopian government in collaboration with various humanitarian partners, state-run Ethiopian News Agency (ENA) reported.
Kassa said communities in Ethiopia's south, south-east and lowland areas have been affected by the drought. Now life-saving assistance is being delivered to the affected communities by a consortium of humanitarian actors that brings together the federal government, international partners and regional states in the affected areas.
Noting that this year’s La Niña-induced drought has impacted more than 6.4 million people, covering a wide geographic area, the commissioner said about 60% of all humanitarian assistance in various parts of Ethiopia was covered by the government.
Kassa said the provision of food and non-food items “will continue until their lives are restored back to normal”.
Last week, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the drought was increasingly deteriorating the living conditions and livelihoods of affected communities in parts of south-eastern Ethiopia.
“An emergency response is ongoing and is further required for at least the next five months to save lives and livelihoods and prevent further deterioration of an already extremely dire humanitarian situation with increasing protection concerns for which additional funding is urgently required,” said OCHA.
Earlier this month, the UN said the Ethiopia-Somalia drought had uprooted 845 000 people from their homes and killed more than 1.5 million head of livestock in Ethiopia alone.
Xinhua