The Live Wire



Press Release

British Red Cross steps up aid to Somalia and Kenya

1 September 2011

The British Red Cross has provided a further £1.25m in funding and thousands of pounds worth of goods to alleviate suffering caused by the deepening food crisis in the Horn of Africa.

This latest increase in aid includes £1m to provide almost a million kilos of food and over 100,000 litres of cooking oil to people in Somalia through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and £250,000 to support food, water and sanitation in Kenya through the Kenyan Red Cross.

The £1m allocation to the ICRC includes £300,000 provided to the Red Cross by the Band Aid Charitable Trust specifically to support emergency food aid in central and southern Somalia.

Thousands of blankets, basic cooking equipment for hundreds of families and two warehouse tents, have also been released from pre-positioned British Red Cross stocks in Dubai to support the aid effort in Kenya.

“There are around 12m people in need of support across the region at the moment, and the forecasts are that things will get worse before they get better,“ said Barry Armstrong, disaster response manager with the British Red Cross.

“The aid arriving across the region now is vital for seeing people through until they will be able to feed themselves again.

“As well as emergency food aid, it is really important to deliver help which will enable people to provide food for themselves and secure their livelihoods as soon as possible, and this is what the Red Cross is doing.”

Today's release of funds brings to more than £2.7m the amount the British Red Cross has provided to the Horn of Africa region in the last six weeks alone.

This has included significant funding support from Bloomberg, City of London Corporation and Tesco.

Through the ICRC and the Somali Red Crescent, aid funded by the British Red Cross is able to reach areas of Somalia off-limits to many other agencies.

The Somali Red Crescent is continuing to expand its work and now has feeding centres across the whole country, including all areas most affected by malnutrition.

To donate to the British Red Cross East Africa Food Crisis Appeal call 0845 054 7200 or visit redcross.org.uk/foodcrisis.



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