East Africa
Sustainable development means working together to meet people’s basic needs—the things they need to survive, such as food, clean water and a place to live—in ways that will continue to work in the long term and will protect the environment.
Water and sanitation are key elements of sustainable development. As a result of the drought in East Africa that began in 2005, millions of people with minimal access to clean drinking water or adequate sanitation faced an ever-worsening situation. Water sources dried up and people had to walk even further to find safe water. Water-borne diseases became even more common. Even when rains came, they flooded and contaminated many existing safe water sources. Natural disasters like droughts are common in East Africa, and they always affect people’s ability to live sustainably.
The Drought
Beginning in 2005, a number of countries in East Africa, including Kenya and Tanzania, experienced an intense drought as a result of repeated failed rainy seasons. In Kenya, Maasai herders lost more and more grazing land for their cattle and were forced into urban centers to find grass for their cows. Once in the cities, many of the Maasai, accustomed to a pastoral way of life, couldn’t survive and resorted to living in slums and begging on the streets.
For herders who didn’t leave the plains, many watched their cattle die one by one. Soon the people had nothing left for food or sustenance. In many areas, up to 70 percent of people’s cattle died of hunger. Animal carcasses polluted the ground and water. Children dropped out of school at a greater rate as they were forced to leave their communities to take remaining herds to greener pastures, if any existed.
As different communities began vying for scarce resources, conflicts arose. This was the worst drought that East Africa had seen in a decade; some experts called it “a silent tsunami.” Many people died of hunger and thirst.
Think About It, Talk About It
Challenge your students to think about the drought in East Africa next time they say, “I’m dying of thirst” or “I’m starving to death”. How does it feel to know that people actually are dying of thirst and starving to death around the world? What are some ways your students may be able to help raise awareness about the issue?
Out of East Africa and Into the Classroom
Rent the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and watch the section on how global warming causes events like droughts, floods and other natural disasters. Talk about how your students can reduce their environmental footprint in order to minimize their impact on the environment.
Environmental sustainability and poverty are interconnected—when people are poor, they rely heavily on natural resources to sustain them, often depleting or destroying those resources in the process.
People in poor and rural areas of Kenya and Tanzania, for example, use wood for cooking, which means forest areas are being rapidly depleted as people cut them down for firewood. Thinning forests eventually lead to deforestation and to land that can no longer even be used for agriculture, the mainstay of most rural East Africans. Deforestation coupled with global warming is leading to the Sahara desert expanding at an alarming rate.