Displaying items by tag: Kenya

Evarline is hundreds of pounds in debt, after paying a pastor to pray for her. She lives in a Nairobi slum and can no longer provide for her four children. Evarline lost her job so when she heard about a pastor whose prayers could make life better, she went to see him. He asked her for 15,000 Kenyan shillings (£96). This is called a ‘seed offering’: a financial contribution to a religious leader, with a specific outcome in mind. She borrowed the money from a friend, who took out a loan on her behalf. She had been told this pastor's prayers were so powerful that she would see a return on her money within a week. The miracle never came. The loan her friend took out ballooned due to unpaid interest. She has no idea how she'll pay it back. Her friend has stopped talking to her. She still has no job.

Sometimes called ‘feathered locusts’, queleas are pests across eastern and southern Africa. A quelea eats 10g of grain daily. Not a huge amount, but flocks can number two million and collectively consume 20 tonnes of grain in 24 hours. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation estimates that £41m worth of crops are lost to the birds annually. The latest quelea invasion in Kisumu, amounting to ten million birds, has already decimated 300 acres of rice fields. Another 2,000 acres are still at risk during the harvest season. Worse hit is Narok county where the birds invaded wheat farms, destroying 40% of the harvest. The prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa has meant fewer seeds from wild grasses, a primary source of food for queleas. Kenyan scientists suggest this may be behind the invasion of cultivated land as the birds look for alternatives.

‘Our efforts have been fruitless,’ said a Christian farmer in northern Kenya. ‘Wild animals are invading our farms and eating everything - hippos, elephants, buffaloes. Families have been struggling with nothing to eat.’ This is another problem added to the prolonged drought biting ever deeper. Crops fail, livestock perish, and the all-important water source, the Tana River, dwindles and dries up. Children in northern Kenya have already begun to die of hunger. Barnabas Aid is continuing to feed Christians in that area, where our fellow-believers are a minority and do not get help from the main aid agencies in the area. The rainy season, October to December, is forecast to be short and light across most of the country.

A huge consignment of life-saving personal protective equipment (PPE), shipped to Tanzania through medical.gives, is being deployed to protect health workers from a deadly new Ebola threat. The consignment was welcomed by health minister Ummy Mwalimu and presented by Mags Gaynor, a representative of the Irish government, which donated the equipment. The handover came days after Tanzania was put on alert and health surveillance was stepped up when neighbouring Uganda confirmed 35 infections and seven deaths from a strain of Ebola for which there is no vaccine or drug treatment. Medical masks, gloves, scrubs and other items are being issued to health staff working in areas of Tanzania deemed at the highest risk of an Ebola outbreak. PPE is also being issued to staff helping to combat Covid-19. Fifty million PPE pieces, worth £25 million, have been donated to Christian hospitals in east and southern Africa by the Irish government.

Unprecedented famine grips parts of Africa. Four years of droughts, Covid-19, and the Ukraine war have created dire conditions. In Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, one person dies from hunger every 48 seconds. Water sources and wells have dried up. Crops have failed, livestock have died, and 22 million people may starve. Many farmers only grow enough to feed themselves. Many relying on livestock see their animals die. Families forced to flee looking for food embark on very perilous journeys. The level of pain and suffering is devastating. Half of Somalia’s population are experiencing crisis hunger levels. One in three children face chronic malnutrition. Before Ukraine’s war Somalia imported 90% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Ethiopia imported 42%. Kenya 44%, plus oil, iron, steel, and fertilisers. In late August, the first grain shipment from Ukraine brought 23,000 tons of wheat - enough for 1.5 million for a month, a drop in the bucket for needy millions. See also the Europe article on Ukraine cargo ships leaving.

IJM reports, ‘Last week we celebrated justice for IJM lawyer WK, his client and their driver. Three police officers and one civilian were convicted of their murder’. Prior to 2016, few police officers had ever been convicted for murder - despite many instances of police abusing power. But in the past five years, 45 officers have been convicted on murder or manslaughter charges. This gives hope to victims and families of police abuse that justice is possible. ‘Also, praise God for the acquittal of an innocent IJM client in Kenya. He was framed for a crime he didn't commit. During the trial, the prosecution failed to produce any witnesses. He is now free, but please pray for him to be protected from further false accusations.’

This is one of the hardest times Kenyans have experienced. Four rainy seasons in a row have failed. The government declared a national disaster after only two consecutive failed rainy seasons. Since then, the short rains and the long rains have both failed again. Water is hard to find; cattle are dying. Even camels struggle to survive. The World Food Programme says half a million Kenyans could starve. Prolonged hunger and malnutrition have made people prone to disease: their weakened bodies can’t resist infections. In Muslim-dominated areas, Christians are usually left out when government food relief is distributed. Families used to earn their living as casual labourers or through small businesses, but normal life has ended with the catastrophic drought and famine which followed a series of other disasters.

Kenya is in a world of hurt. Joy Mueller of Kenya Hope says, ‘They look at having no food to feed their families and no money to pay school fees or buy the things they need. For the third year in a row, these poor people are just devastated. First, the pandemic locked everything down, so rural Kenyans couldn’t buy supplies or sell their livestock at the market. Then right on the heels of the pandemic, they got hit with a severe drought. All the water sources dried up; pastureland was gone and animals were dying. For the people here, their animals are their bank accounts. 2022 seemed to be the start of something better when they got some beautiful rain in February. Hope sprang again, but then they were hit by African armyworms. They’re called armyworms because they march across the field eating every green thing in their path.’

The Horn of Africa is in crisis with drought and food insecurity. 20 million are impacted or in need of aid; pray for the survival needs of both livestock and humans to be met after three failed rainy seasons back to back. In Somalia 4.3 million people are hungry, and people fear a repeat of the 2012 famine. In Ethiopia, the drought is compounding the humanitarian disaster of the war in the country’s north, while in neighbouring Kenya’s pastoralist zone, the loss of cattle is triggering raids and clashes between communities. In Myanmar farmers say the 2021 coup worsened food insecurity and is nothing short of a disaster. Humanitarian needs multiply and continue to spiral. One million people needed aid before the coup; now it’s 14 million. 500,000 people have been displaced since the coup, a quarter of the population is food insecure and violent new conflicts spread in a new wave of anti-coup militias. ‘There is fear everywhere’, one aid worker said.

A short drive from the United Nations complex in Nairobi where talks on a global plastics treaty took place recently is Kenya's biggest landfill - a mountain of garbage, carpeted in single-use plastic. The equivalent of thirty trucks full of throwaway plastic packaging, bags and containers is tipped onto Dandora dump every day - a trend set to worsen with global plastic pollution forecast to double over the next decade. This global waste crisis, which is destroying habitats, killing wildlife and contaminating the food chain, has sparked calls for radical action in a treaty billed as the most important environmental pact since the Paris Agreement. ‘Our expectation is that when the treaty is signed countries will commit to stop the production of such plastics’, said Hibrahim Otieno, and he is not alone. Three in four people want single-use plastics banned as soon as possible.