•The 2021 Global Hunger Index released on Thursday ranked Kenya 87 out of the 116 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2021 GHI scores.
•With a score of 23, Kenya has a serious level of hunger.
Image: HESBORN ETYANG
Kenya must promote climate-resilient foods to feed its growing population.
A news report on hunger shows climate-resilient food can withstand harsh conditions, thereby helping to ensure food and nutrition security.
Drought resistance crops include green grams, sorghum, millets, pigeon peas, cowpeas and groundnuts.
Kenya's population is about 50 million out of which 2.5 million are facing starvation.
The Kenya food security alert shows the number of those in need of food aid could hit three to four million people, partly due to the impacts of climate change.
The 2021 Global Hunger Index released on Thursday ranked Kenya 87 out of the 116 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2021 GHI scores.
With a score of 23, Kenya has a serious level of hunger.
The report cites conflict, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic as the most powerful and toxic forces driving hunger and threatening to wipe out any progress made against hunger in recent years.
The report calls for the strengthening of diversified farming practices.
The report says this will allow communities to diversify their production, increase their income, boost their nutritional intake and food security.
It says social protection measures such as cash and voucher assistance are essential to enhance the resilience of rural food economics and households affected by shocks and stress.
The report says transparency, accountability and inclusive participation must be addressed.
It says resilient food systems must be enhanced to simultaneously address the impacts of conflict and climate change.
“Government and donors must promote interventions in conflict settings that link immediate and long term livelihood needs, reconciliation and peacebuilding,” the report says.
It calls for the strengthening of inclusive locally-led initiatives based on a thorough understanding of the context.
The report says humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors must engage in systemic and ongoing analysis of the context.
“All programmes and interventions must identify the causes of and actors in any conflict and must design programming with an understanding of existing power relations, placing affected people at the centre,” it says.
The report says partnership should bring together local, national, and international actors.
It says donors, UN agencies, NGOs and local actors should strive to build and maintain cross-sectoral and long term relationships.
The report says the move requires multiyear donor investments in long term development and peacebuilding that are adaptable to the highly fluid and dynamic contexts of conflicts and crisis.
It says states must live up to their responsibility to end protracted crises, but donor countries, key UN agencies and regional bodies must address conflict and its consequences including food and nutrition security lens.
The report says the food system must be changed.
It says government must follow up on the UN Food systems summit by addressing the structural challenges.
The challenges, the report says, include inequities, market failures, health risks, and environmental and climate threats that are embedded in food systems.
The report says actions must put vulnerable people at the centre of food policies and build on the existing responsibilities such as Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Agreement on climate change and humanitarian rights treaties.
Edited by Kiilu Damaris