Christian Aid Agencies Have a New Approach to Famine
Relief has changed in time for Africa’s worst food shortage in 80 years.
Agya Afari in Dodowa, Ghana, turns the corn and cassava dough in a pan perched on a coal pot as his middle child fans the coals. Nearby, his wife, Yaa Manu, grinds pepper, tomato, and onion to make a sauce for supper. The only form of protein, two boiled eggs, is traditionally reserved for the adults in the household.
“This has become a way of life for us lately—banku and boiled eggs with ground pepper,” Afari laments in Twi. “Limited work in this current economy, increasing prices, and a pest invasion on our farm means my family and I have been struggling to make ends meet. One daily meal that satisfies everyone is impossible,” he adds.
This may seem like a timeless story of food insecurity. But Afari’s family is affected by the most widespread global hunger crisis on record. In the past couple of years, the need for food aid has more than doubled, with the World Food Program estimating that today 345 million people are close to starvation. World Vision estimates that one in five Africans suffered from hunger in 2020 and that over the past two years, the situation has only worsened.
In West Africa, 151 million people didn’t have enough food in August of 2022, according to the World Food Program. In East Africa (particularly the Horn of Africa), it estimated, 79 million people needed food. Without strategic help, their suffering will be deepened and prolonged.
But strategic help hasn’t always been the rule. In fact, Christian aid agencies have significantly changed the way they provide food assistance over recent decades to adjust to some difficult lessons.
During the well-publicized Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, relief consisted mainly of the direct delivery of food from donor ...