East Africa Drought Response

The worst drought in 60 years is devastating East Africa. According to United Nations reports, limited rainfall since 2010 has created severe drought and widespread food shortages affecting more than 11 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti. The famine has already killed more than 29,000 children under 5 in southern Somalia alone, and hundreds of thousands of Somali children are acutely malnourished and at risk of starving to death unless they receive help.

To date, LCMS World Relief and Human Care (WR-HC) has provided $150,000 in grants to Lutheran partners for famine relief in East Africa: $100,000 to the LCMS partner church in Kenya for food for struggling families in the hardest-hit areas of northern Kenya, and $50,000 to Lutheran World Relief (LWR), the pan-Lutheran international aid organization based in Baltimore, for serving some of the nearly 400,000 Somali refugees living in overflowing refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya.