East Africa
Street children swim in a flooded road after heavy rain in Kolkata. The June-to-September monsoons are vital to hundreds of millions of farmers and to economic growth in Asia’s third-largest economy.
Hundreds of thousands of Somali children could die in East Africa’s famine unless more help arrives, a top U.S. official warned Monday in the starkest death toll prediction yet. To highlight the crisis, the wife of Vice President Biden visited a refugee camp in Kenya filed with hungry Somalis.
Jill Biden is the highest-profile U.S. visitor to East Africa since the number of refugees coming across the Somali border dramatically increased in July. Washington is preparing to announce roughly $100 million in new famine aid, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because an official announcement has not been made.
Raj Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who accompanied Biden, said hundreds of thousands of children could die from the famine.
Aid is reaching only about 20 percent of the 2.6 million Somalis who need it, Mark Bowden, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official for Somalia, said on a visit Monday to Mogadishu, the capital. The situation is better in Mogadishu, where about half the city’s 600,000 inhabitants are receiving aid, he said.
Transport and security are the two main problems, he said, and it is unclear what the effect will be of Islamist insurgents’ pullout from the capital on Saturday.
In other developments, the U.N. refugee agency on Monday flew 31 metric tons of shelter materials into Mogadishu, the first UNHCR aid flight into the city in five years. UNHCR says about 100,000 people have fled there in the past two months.
— Associated Press
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