Photography commission for the Red Cross in the Horn of Africa

I was commissioned by the IFRC (International Federation of the Red Cross), Swedish Red Cross and British Red Cross to photograph their East Africa Food Crisis response programmes in Turkana, north Kenya.

Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are the countries most affected by the severe drought in East Africa. According to OCHA more than 11 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.

At the end of May 2011 the Kenyan Government declared the ongoing draught a national disaster. Water scarcity, crop failure, reduced pasture, livestock mortality, skipping meals, increased malnutrition among the young, and competition for scarce resources, including armed conflict, illustrate some of the difficulties people are facing to fulfill their basic needs in Kenya.

The Kenyan Red Cross has been implementing emergency activities such as provision of relief food and water to the most vulnerable groups (children, women, elderly). At the same time, it is working with communities to build their resilience to future disasters, including provision of clean water, good hygiene and sanitation, health services and the introduction of ‘dry-seeds’.

For this commission I photographed Red Cross programmes in Turkana, a large region in the North of Kenya covering 77,000 km². Turkana is a very poor region, severely affected by the draught and with almost 1/3 of its 850,000 population highly dependent on food aid.