U.N. warns 3.5M Kenyans will need food aid by September

The U.N. on Tuesday said approximately 3.5 million Kenyans will need food aid due to drought by September, "while European officials warned such crises would flare up again unless more money was directed at prevention efforts," Reuters reports (Obulutsa/Migiro, 7/26). VOA News examined how "food security experts are looking for lessons from severe droughts of the past, when worst case scenarios were avoided (Colombant, 7/26).

Meanwhile, "[u]p to 100,000 internally displaced people have arrived in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, over the last two months in search of food, water, shelter and other vital humanitarian assistance after fleeing famine-hit areas," the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Tuesday, the U.N. News Centre writes (7/26). In other parts of Somalia, IRIN reports that the country's "opposition Al-Shabab group has granted several aid organizations access to some of the south-central areas under its control, including Lower Shabelle, one of two regions the U.N. recently declared to be famine-stricken" (7/26).

UNICEF reported on Tuesday it has begun a vaccination campaign in the Dadaab refugee camp area aimed at immunizing more than 200,000 children against measles and polio, as well as providing vitamin A and deworming tablets, according to a UNICEF "News Note" (7/26).

IRIN has published "a list of the top contributors to humanitarian funding in 2011 in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia" (7/26).