Kenya Drought & Food Insecurity Emergency/Early Recovery Phase Caritas Kenya as a development and social services commission of the Kenya Episcopal Conference has a role to ensure that the capacities of Catholic Church-based development structures are strengthened, so as to respond to the needs of the poor more effectively. 

Kenya’s disaster profile is dominated by cyclical phenomenon including drought, famine and floods. These occurrences disrupt people’s livelihoods, destroy the infrastructure, divert planned use of resources, interrupt economic activities and retard development. Others which are recurrent include fire, terrorism, technological accidents, diseases and epidemics. Through Programmes, Caritas Kenya coordinates emergency activities while at the same time integrates long term development in a bid to build mitigation capacities for disaster prevention. The overall goal is to establish and maintain an efficient, effective and coordinated system for managing disasters in order to minimize losses and resulting disruptions and destructions of people’s life and livelihoods, infrastructure, economy and degradation of the environment.

This emergency appeal is proposing to mitigate the negative impact of drought on vulnerable households in Kenya by improving food security of drought affected vulnerable pastoral, agro-pastoral and marginal agricultural households through food and nutrition, WASH and early recovery activities in 14 Dioceses of Kenya. The project will reach a total of 182,520 beneficiaries, or 30,420 households. The targeted households will benefit from both immediate life saving assistance as well as activities that will enable their livelihoods to recover from the current drought. 

The total budget of the project is €3,959,919 Euros, the full amount of which is sought from CI members, and the duration of the project is 8 months. 

Project Rationale:
Two consecutive below-average rainy seasons have caused Eastern Africa’s most severe drought in sixty years, with an estimated 3.6 million and predicted to increase to 5 million Kenyans affected by the drought and in need of emergency assistance. The drought crisis in the Horn of Africa represents the most serious food insecurity situation in the world today, in terms of both scale and severity.  Extremely low levels of precipitation have resulted in widespread food insecurity, pushing malnutrition and mortality rates to emergency levels across the country in recent months.  Critical water and pasture shortages have caused livestock deaths and rising food prices have further limited households’ access to food. North-Eastern Kenya is the worst affected part of the country, with Global Acute Malnutrition rates in some areas exceeding 30% and steadily increasing according to Kenya Health Cluster updayte of 28th July 2011.  Other areas of Kenya that have been traditionally food secure, and a safety net for vulnerable communities, are themselves under serious threat of a full blown humanitarian disaster, with FEWSNET now ranking the majority of the country at ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ levels. On 30 May, the Government of Kenya declared the drought a national disaster.

In the past decade Kenya has experienced three serious droughts. As droughts occur at shorter intervals, the recovery period for communities is shorter and natural resources are unable to recover to sustainable levels. The country has experienced a succession of poor cropping seasons, with the exception of the fairly good El-Niño season of 2010. Most seasons have witnessed erratic rainfall, low volumes of rainfall and extended dry periods. Such inconsistencies during normally productive periods has led to a gross reduction in the production of food, insufficient recovery of water aquifers and the increasing spread of arid areas. The traditionally productive areas that receive rains have reported inconsistencies in precipitation, which has resulted in either total failure or widespread poor crop performance.  

Specific problems identified include:
Nutrition
Nutrition assessments by UNICEF in July 2011 showed Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) rates exceeding the critical Emergency threshold of 15% in all of the northern districts surveyed. The following are the rates established in the areas being targeted for intervention; 
• 33% in Lodwar diocese
• 22 – 32% in Garissa diocese
• 15.7% in Isiolo diocese
• 27.1% in Marsabit diocese
• 19.8% in Maralal diocese
The other dioceses included in the proposal are all experiencing malnutrition levels above the normal range of 1-5% GAM rates. Under five crude mortality rate has reached more than the emergency threshold (2/10,000 /day) in Lodwar diocese (up to 3.24). In the same diocese the crude mortality rate (adults and children) has reached more than the emergency threshold (1/10,000 /day) at 2.42

Food Access
• With many animals dead in the Northern Dioceses as a result of the drought, and with the few remaining ones being targeted by raiders, many families have no means to feed themselves. 
• Prices of staples are 60-80 percent higher than the 5-year average in most markets and are close or higher than record prices reported in 2008.. 
• In the Northern Dioceses where many families affected by the drought are entirely dependent on animal keeping for their livelihood, there has been a total loss of livelihood.. Such families are highly dependent on food aid.
• With successive failure of rain seasons, most of the families in the Marginal agricultural and coastal dioceses have lost successive crops and have no reserves of food nor the income to acquire food from the markets.
• Communities are engaging in adverse coping mechanisms, such as  skipping meals and in some cases for the whole day, including children, expectant mothers and also other vulnerable categories. Schools are reporting net migration of families from  drought affected areas. In Wajir and Turkana districts some schools are seeing a large increase in attendance (up to as much as 50%) as families access food through existent school feeding programmes. 

Water
• Poor rainfall has led to a poor recharge of water sources – (30-60% of capacity), and many of the water sources have dried up.
• Distances to water points have increased from an average of 1-5 km to 8-20 km in the areas targeted by the project.
• In many areas, the most practical intervention is to rehabilitate the available boreholes to increase the community’s access to clean water, but with the loss of livelihoods options communities are unable to support such rehabilitation.. 

Livelihoods (livestock/crops)
• Livestock conditions have continued deteriorating due to the prolonged drought period. Goats and cattle have fared worst, with many areas reporting mortalities. The condition of camels is fair to poor. 
• Due to the high concentration of livestock in areas that received little rainfall, conflict over water and pastures is reported.
• Farmers in the coastal and southeastern marginal agricultural lowlands are faced with the third successive poor season after failure of the 2011 long rains crop in these areas. Rains started one month late during the last week of April after a substantial proportion of the crop had wilted. Less than 20 percent of normal output is anticipated in these areas. 

Incorporating relevant CAFOD interests
Caritas Kenya, in close collaboration with the in-country Caritas Partners and other humanitarian actors, has closely monitored the situation as it has been unfolding since October 2010. This has included field assessments, information gathering from the Diocesan partners, and participation in humanitarian monitoring meetings. Caritas Diocesan partners have also participated in the government’s assessment process, which has included data collection and collation.

To co-ordinate the national impact of CI MO’s in country, and to capture the combined findings from all CI MO’s in country, Caritas Kenya has held coordination meetings with the Caritas Country Forum since November 2010 when the situation began to unfold. The last Caritas Country Forum meeting was held 3rd August, with representation from Caritas Kenya, CAFOD, Trocaire, Caritas Italiana, Caritas Australia, Caritas Switzerland/Luxembourg, Cordaid, CRS, Caritas Austria and representatives from Caritas Internationalis, including CI Humanitarian director Alistair Dutton and John Coughon. Caritas Kenya has mapped out the interventions by Catholic Agencies across the country, especially in areas worst hit by the drought. This has helped establish the gaps that exist in terms of interventions within the Church based actors as well by other humanitarian actors. 

The Kenya Episcopal Conference launched a local appeal on 28th July 2011 to all Dioceses, Congregations and people of good will to support humanitarian interventions in the most affected areas of the country. By 4th August 2011 the local appeal had raised over KSh. 100,000 (€ 770).

Implementation strategies reflect best practice and lessons learned from a number of Caritas Kenya emergency responses in the past, including the 2007 flood response, the 2008 post election violence emergency response, the 2009 food insecurity emergency and  the 2009 flood response. From these responses, Caritas Kenya has gained experience in the application of Sphere standards, community mobilization, aid coordination, and in utilizing the Caritas national network to improve approaches to food security and sustainable livelihoods within participating and other dioceses in the country. Of the fourteen dioceses that have been targeted in this EA, all except one ( Kitui ) have been involved in previous Caritas Kenya led Emergency responses. 

Sustainability
The overall management of funds obtained shall be done by the Kenya Episcopal Conference - Catholic Secretariat, Finance Commission, with the added support of a Finance Officer seconded from another Caritas agency.  This has been the strategy used in previous EA’s in which the CI MOs in Kenya provided capacity support for funds management, eg  during the post election violence emergency interventions in 2008.

The Diocesan Finance departments will be responsible for local finance management including the procurement. However, if situation(s) arise where the dioceses are unable to execute some elements of implementation, Caritas Kenya may step in to assist the Dioceses. 

An external audit shall be done at completion of project. All the Dioceses participating in this appeal shall submit their accounts to Caritas Kenya for verification and internal audit through the Caritas Kenya system of Finance, to be then further subjected to audit by an external auditor.

The project has already secured an M&E Officer, who has been seconded from another Caritas agency for the first 3 months. This position will be transitioned into the recruitment of a national M&E officer, dedicated to this response for the remainder of the project and 2 months beyond its completion. This position will be dedicated to the design and implementation of a monitoring framework for the response, and will also assist with reporting. 

Specific issues for CAFOD monitoring
The project has been designed to ensure that the emergency phase will transition well into an early rehabilitation stage, as the short rains are anticipated in October.  The design of the project is based on the assumption that the rains in October will be fairly normal and with the provision of drought tolerant seeds and proper water harvesting measures, both agro-pastoralists and pastoralists will have adequate pasture and crop production. Restocking the two groups of agro-pastoralists and pastoralists with both traditional and improved breeds of goats and drought tolerant seeds will also support livelihood recovery. With improved pasture and crop production, and re-stocking of livestock, beneficiaries will be supported to re-engage in the livelihoods activities, of which local diocesan partners have been supporting communities over several years, as part of their development programs. Such long term livelihood activities aim at increasing production and hence building communities’ resilience. 

Cafod would like to intervene in specific areas in this proposal, which are Monitoring and Evaluation, Communication and Accountability mechanisms.