The families of nomadic herdsmen in Kenya's remote Wajir province, where in some areas it has not rained in three years, will have a better chance at a healthy future thanks to an immediate infusion of emergency supplies of clean drinking water.

TPRF has made an outright grant of $25,000 to Mercy Corps (MC) and up to $10,000 more in matching funds to help address the immediate life-threatening situation as well as to take steps to help avoid such devastation in the future. The matching funds will be at 50 cents per dollar for funds raised on a TPRF campaign on Facebook.

Thanks in part to this donation, MC will be able to improve the ability of 7,500 households—about 45,000 people—in Wajir to cope with and recover from these natural and man-made disasters. In addition to trucking in water, MC volunteers will ensure that target communities have rehabilitated and functioning water supply systems, appropriate sanitation facilities and increased access to information about health and hygiene. Overall, Mercy Corps is helping an estimated 195,750 people caught in what has been called Kenya’s worst drought in more than 60 years.

Wajir, bordered by Somalia to the east and Ethiopia to the north, is Kenya's second largest county, covering more than 35,000 square miles—about the size of the state of Maine. As many as 70% of its residents depend almost entirely on livestock for their livelihood.

For centuries, drought has been a fact of life across the Horn of Africa. Local herdsmen, who rely on rainfall to replenish water supplies and grow crops to feed their families and herds, have developed a nomadic lifestyle to cope with it. But this traditional response is insufficient in the face of a constellation of new factors.

Whereas major droughts used to occur perhaps once a decade, giving the land and its people time to recover, climate change has greatly accelerated the pace. Now drought descends on the region on average every two years. Abetting these climactic challenges are widespread political turmoil and corruption.

In Wajir, this has resulted in the collapse of the local economy, decimating purchasing power at a time when its people have little or no livestock left to sell. Concurrent inflation puts safe drinking water beyond the reach of many. Herdsmen are traveling farther and farther from home in desperate attempts to keep their remaining animals alive, leaving their women and children to fend for themselves.

This is the third Mercy Corp initiative that TPRF has helped to fund. Earlier this year, the two nonprofits teamed up to ameliorate the aftereffects of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan; at the end of 2010, TPRF helped fund MC's response to the cholera outbreak in Haiti.

photo credit:  mother and child/Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

photo credit:  girl with water cans/Erin Gray/Mercy Corps