Jill Biden says Horn of Africa needs more drought relief

NAIROBI — U.S. First Lady Jill Biden visited drought-hit communities in Kenya on Sunday and appealed to wealthy nations to give more as the Horn of Africa suffers the driest conditions in decades.

Biden ended her two-nation tour of Africa by calling for more spotlight on the record-breaking drought that is threatening 22 million deaths in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.

The United States funded the lion’s share of the relief budget for the disaster that killed millions of livestock and destroyed crops.

“We can’t be the only ones. We must get other countries to join us in this global effort to help these people in the region,” Biden said at an aid point in Kajiado, a bone-dry county south of Nairobi.

“Unfortunately, you know that there is a war in Ukraine. There is the earthquake in Turkey. I mean, there’s a lot of competing interests, but obviously here… people are starving.”

Biden heard from parents struggling to feed their children and from communities unable to get enough water after five consecutive failed rainy seasons.

Drought was a key focus of Biden’s visit to Kenya, with another engagement looking at food security and agriculture in a changing climate.

But the 71-year-old community college professor also met with women and youth leaders, toured an informal settlement and laid a wreath for those killed in the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi.

Her visit to Kenya, and before that Namibia, aims to build on the US-Africa leadership summit in Washington late last year, where President Joe Biden said his country was “all in it” on the hotly contested continent.

Africa has once again become a diplomatic battleground following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, and Jill Biden’s visit was the first by a senior White House official to the continent since her husband came to power.

In Namibia, Biden said the United States is committed to helping African nations get a louder voice at the United Nations and other international bodies.

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