Nairobi's Urban Food Crisis

Nairobi’s Urban Food Crisis There is food in the markets, but people can’t afford it. The drought that has been hitting the headlines in the Horn of Africa is not just limited to the arid scrublands of Somalia and northern Kenya. In th…

Nairobi’s Urban Food Crisis

There is food in the markets, but people can’t afford it.

The drought that has been hitting the headlines in the Horn of Africa is not just limited to the arid scrublands of Somalia and northern Kenya. In the slums of Nairobi, the drought has contributed to an increase of food and fuel prices, meaning that people are going hungry whilst the shops next to their shanty houses are stocked with goods.

Milicent, above, is sixteen months old, and was suffering from malnutrition. Her mother, Rosemary, noticed that she was not putting on weight, and sought help from an aid group working in Nairobi’s Korogocho slum, where they both live.

“Sometime we eat just once a day”, says Rosemary, who describes the food prices right now as very high. Milicent is one of five children, and a typical meal is ugali, a Kenyan staple made from mixing maize flour and water. To feed her children, Rosemary will sometimes have to skip a meal herself, drinking just a cup of tea.

Her husband is a casual labourer, and with irregular work, the family has problems affording enough food for the family. They moved to Nairobi two years ago from the country in search of work. “Life is much harder in the city, if there is no work you won’t eat” Rosemary says.

Segregation

Segregation It was with more than a little trepidation that I took this assignment in Belfast. Not because of “The Troubles” (and I still can’t get over the understatement in this term), but for photographing something that looks …

Segregation

It was with more than a little trepidation that I took this assignment in Belfast. Not because of “The Troubles” (and I still can’t get over the understatement in this term), but for photographing something that looks so familiar, something so much like where I grew up, and what I took for granted.

Since I began making a living out of photography back in January, much of my work has been centred around events, and all of it in Africa - from Libya, through the Sudans, to Kenya and Somalia. They have been stories of conflict, of voting, of famine and drought. And if I was working on quieter stories, it was still “exotic”; a different scenery, and different peoples, for the largely western audience that views (and buys) my work.

Here in Northern Ireland, the terraced houses reminded me of Sheffield. The faces looked the same as those who I grew up with. I wouldn’t have that “safety net” of the exotic on this assignment.

I was working with a journalist who I first met in Libya, as we crossed the border from Egypt. The story was for a weekend supplement of Le Monde, and would have roots in a civil war that took place in my own country as I was growing up, but which I realised I knew less about than many other conflicts in other corners of the globe.

What shocked me the most were the “Peace Walls”. We talk about—and deplore—the Israeli wall that separates the Palestinian Territories from Israel, segregating two peoples. But these exist in Belfast today. Under the shadow of it, gardens are covered in netting and mesh, resembling small prisons, to protect them from bricks and other missiles thrown over from the opposite side. I had seen the same thing in Hebron.

And these are not relics of the past, now that peace talks have brought about a relative calm. People here say that the walls are still needed, to keep two opposing communities apart. Integration is a long way off yet.

» Read Belfast, en paix mais toujours divisée — Le Monde des religions
» See the tearsheet in my portfolio

A Day-Trip to Dhobley, Somalia

I haven’t been back to Europe for nearly two years. A few days before I was due to fly back to England I was asked if I could go to Somalia, for a day trip just over the Kenyan border. “Sure”, I said, “when is it?” I was keen to see as much of Somalia as I could, and I had failed to reach the other side of the border when Chemi and I drove up a few weeks previously.

“The eleventh” came the reply.

“Euh, that’s the day I’m flying back to London.”

“What time is the flight?” asked my editor.

“Not ‘til the evening” I replied.

“It’ll be fine. You’ll be back by the evening. Can you go?”

And so, with a bag packed for five weeks in the UK and in France, I drove to Wilson airport at some un-Godly hour of the morning, and boarded a small charter plane for a visit by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to Dhobley.

We did our work, I became a convert to the idea of giving money to cattle rather than people - preventing their deaths would save many more lives and is more cost-effective, they tell me - and then flew back to Nairobi. An hour spent in traffic, a spot of writing and editing the pictures, and I just about had time to take a shower before jumping in another taxi for the airport.

The following day, I would be in London, a world away from the conflict and famine of Somalia, and trying to explain everything I have seen over the last two years.

Fleeing Drought

Hassan Ali has a canteen of water slung over one shoulder, in his right hand he holds a walking stick, and in his left, a blackened kettle. A scarf is draped over his head to protect him from the midday sun, he stands in thin, cracked flip-flops, and wears a blue, short-sleeved shirt over polo-shirt, with a Somali wrap-around skirt around his waist. This is all he has left.

With the sun beating over-head, he pours a little water from his kettle over his feet to wash them, ablutions before the dhuhr (noon) prayers.

Hassan is forty-two years old, and fifteen days ago he left his home in Dinsour, Somalia, his livelihood destroyed by the drought that has ravaged Somalia. Two kilometres behind him stands the Somali-Kenyan border, and ahead of him lies the Dadaab refugee complex - the largest refugee camp in the world.

This is where Hassan and his five compatriots are heading. Hassan’s wife and children left Dinsour for Dadaab several weeks previously, whilst he stayed on to try and struggle through the drought, to save his home and land. Now he is walking to join them, a small family amongst 380,000 refugees.

When he arrives, Hassan will register with the camp authorities, and try to locate his family. The camp is already several times over capacity, and it can take days to register, and weeks to receive a refugee—and therefore ration—card.

But before he can do that, Hassan has over one hundred kilometres across the hot sands ahead of him, with little respite. The few, small villages en-route are themselves suffering from the drought, and have already seen so many refugees heading to Dadaab.

Dadaab & Drought

The bus bounded over pot-holed roads, heading north-east from Nairobi into the arid scrubland towards the Somali border. We were seven, crammed into the back seat of this behemoth, thrown upwards out of our seats on some of the nastier bumps, my head once hitting the roof.

Past Garissa, all that lay ahead of us was the Somali border—an unruly frontier—and Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp.

The three camps that comprise the Dadaab refugee complex, and which are already over-capacity, have swelled in recent months, their numbers growing due to the drought (and subsequent famine) ravaging Somalia.

I began working on the drought back in May, covering the drought-displaced in Mogadishu. Conditions were terrible back then, and people were arriving into the war-torn capital in a deplorable state. I had never seen malnutrition this bad.

This did not prepare me, however, for what I would encounter in Dadaab. The size of the place is overwhelming; the sheer number of people living here, as refugees from a war-torn country, many for over a decade. The camps are overwhelmed by the number of people arriving, unable to process that many (over 1000) people each day. And in the hospitals, the severity of the malnutrition was unlike anything I had encountered, neither in eastern Sudan, South Sudan nor Mogadishu.

When I was in Mogadishu, it seemed like no-one was covering the drought, it took over a month for the pictures to appear on the Guardian website. Now, half of the Juba independence press corps. The drought is all over the international news, and rightly so. Through a proper response, political will and, admittedly, with cooperation from al-Shebab, much of this could have been prevented.

» For more coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa, see my portfolio