Ethiopia is currently experiencing several intersecting humanitarian crises including conflict, climatic shocks, COVID-19, desert locust infestation and more, affecting nearly 30 million people. This brief outlines important contextual factors and social impacts of the Northern Ethiopian crisis and offers key considerations to improve the effectiveness of the humanitarian response.
In this paper we review the evidence on the impact of large shocks, such as drought, on child and adult health, with particular emphasis on Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Our focus is on the impact of shocks on long-term outcomes, and we ask whether there are intrahousehold differences in these effects.
The evidence suggests substantial fluctuations in body weight and growth retardation in response to shocks. While there appears to be no differential impact between boys and girls, adult women are often worse affected by these shocks. For children, there is no full recovery from these losses, affecting adult health and education outcomes, as well as lifetime earnings. For adults, there is no evidence of persistent effects from transitory shocks in our data.
Since June 2015, Ethiopia has been affected by the worst drought in the last 30–50 years,with over 10.2 million people in need of food assistance as of December 2015, compared to 2.9 million in the beginning of 2015. In 2016, the number of people in need is expected to reach over 15 million.
Most of the regions of Amhara, Oromia, and SNNPR are reported to be in Crisis (IPC Phase 3) food insecurity. In the most affected areas, over 75% of meher cropping production has been lost, one million livestock have died, and over 1.7million are reportedly at risk due to bad body conditions. Meher cropping represents 90%of the country’s total grain production, which accounts for 80% of Ethiopian agriculture.