Khadra Suleiman, at Ali Hussein IDP camp, Somaliland. Ali Hussein camp is one of several large camps for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) on the edge of Burao town. Some people have come from Mogadishu and South Central Somalia to escape the conflict, others have come because of drought... Mother-of-five Khadra Suleiman is struggling to cope with the rising cost of living in the camp – particularly the cost of food (continue reading Oxfam report 7/13/2011).
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon this morning called an emergency session of the heads of UN agencies to lay out a ground plan to address the need for urgent assistance to the people in the region.
"We must do everything we can to prevent this crisis deepening," he said. "The human cost of this crisis is catastrophic. We cannot afford to wait."
The 30-mile-long Dadaab Refugee Camp is ground zero in the relief effort for victims of the East African famine, now being called the "worst humanitarian disaster in the World."  With a population of over 400,000, the three Dadaab camps  – Ifo, Hagadera and Dagahaley –  are now home to the third largest population center in Kenya, after Nairobi and Mombasa.
The famine's epicenter lies in the nomadic region along the shared borders of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. The lives of 11 million people are threatened by this crisis, attributed to the combined impact of the worst drought in 60 years and the high cost of food resulting from global food insecurity.  link
Somalia, already devastated by ongoing violence and displacements from two decades of civil war, is the worst impacted country, with close to 2,000 Somalis arriving daily in Southeast Ethiopia and 1,400 seeking assistance in Kenya.  (source)
“Looking around, we mainly see women and children,” said UNICEF Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa Elhadj As Sy, who has just visited Dadaab. “They are again the ones that are hardest hit by this triple shock of drought – which is related to climate change – [plus] soaring food prices and the armed conflict in Somalia.”
In an interview with Al Jazeera,  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says existing camps have reached capacity and that the makeshift settlements of thousands of huts made from tree branches, covered by UN-supplied plastic sheets, are "catastrophes waiting to happen."
"The children are presenting with skin complications where their skin is peeling off mainly due to deficiency in micro-nutrients," Dr Milhia Abdul Kader said. "They are coming in a very bad shape. (Source: All Africa from Al Jazeera.)
“The most impressive thing, for me, is that the poorest mothers in the worst cases of deprivation still love their children and want the best for them,” said Mr. As Sy. “They want them to be well fed, well-educated and to grow up with a future. To listen to all their stories, with smiles on their faces and hope for the future, is a true source of inspiration for all of us.” Source: Relief Web.
Climate Change and East Africa Drought
As they await the 2014 IPCC 4th report, climate scientists are not yet willing to officially attribute the two-year drought to climate change, with many pointing to existing climate models which predict more precipitation for East African countries. Standing by the tenant that a single event can not be attributed to climate change, most attribute this extreme record-setting drought to an extremely strong La Niña event.
The current La Niña event, which began in 2010, is one of the strongest since the 1970s, says Jan de Leeuw,  ILRI operating project leader. Like El Niño, he says, La Niña occurs in cycles “we don’t understand ... We are in a period now of more frequent La Niña events, but such a situation was there from 1950 till 1976 also.”
NASA defines the current situation as follows: “The pool of warm water in the east intensifies rains in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Domino-style, this pattern also increases the intensity of westerly winds over the Indian Ocean, pulling moisture away from East Africa toward Indonesia and Australia. The result? Drought over most of East Africa and floods and lush vegetation in Australia and other parts of Southeast Asia.”