HIGHLIGHTS
USAID announces an additional $97 million in emergency food assistance to support drought-affected populations.
Administrator Smith discusses drought response in Addis Ababa and visits USAID projects in Tigray
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
On January 31, USAID Administrator Gayle Smith announced an additional $97 million in USAID/FFP funding to provide more than 176,000 metric tons (MT) of emergency food assistance to approximately 4 million Ethiopians. The U.S. Government (USG) remains the largest humanitarian donor to Ethiopia, having provided more than $532 million in humanitarian assistance since October 2014.
In mid-January, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) released its forecast for the February-to-June belg rains, predicting above-average or normal rainfall in much of Ethiopia’s drought-affected areas. Despite the favorable forecast, relief organizations anticipate that acute humanitarian conditions will continue to deteriorate in early 2016 as households exhaust food from the meager 2015 harvest.
USAID is supporting an integrated response that includes scaling up humanitarian assistance, such as nutrition interventions and emergency food assistance, and modifying development programs to mitigate the drought’s impact and speed recovery.