Opinion-Analysis | Bekele Geleta *

Twenty five years after the world was gripped by harrowing scenes of starvation and death in Ethiopia, chronic hunger has returned to the Horn of Africa. Last month, the Ethiopian Government called for urgent international assistance to help feed 6.2 million people.

Across the region, an estimated 23 million people cannot get sufficient food. Again, as was the case 25 years ago, aid organisations are appealing for millions of dollars in a desperate attempt to provide succour.

Yet in the midst of this genuine humanitarian crisis, there is some cynicism about the role or even the efficacy of aid. At the end of October for example, The Times of London ran an article urging Britons to stifle their empathy.

Speaking about the estimated 23 million people in the Horn of Africa who are in the grip of chronic hunger, the piece called on readers to "sit on their hands" lest they misguidedly reach for their cheque-books.

The crux of the argument was that aid - in this case food - was the cause of all evil in Africa. Instead of food, the article called for development and a focus on funding education.

These frustrations are perhaps understandable. Draw a straight line through the famines of the mid-1980s and today's urgent appeals for assistance, and you can see why "aid" is pilloried by some. Given all the money donated and spent, how can so little have changed?

The answer is not that aid is wrong; it's that it could be better. Aid in the form discussed above - reactive and designed to meet an urgent need - does little to build a community's resilience. Once the food runs out, communities are left in the same precarious state that contributed to their suffering in the first place.

A key issue at play here is often the relationship between humanitarian organisations, civil society and governments. Put simply, civil society is about empowering people, whilst governments are often about power. The focus for governments is on building strong economies that can support their populations.

The focus of civil society is much more intimate. It is about supporting families and communities to achieve their own goals - helping them to do what they want with their own lives.

These priorities aren't necessarily at odds with each other, but sometimes they are. A very real challenge for civil society and governments is to better build relationships and trust. Their work must be complementary. In this way, civil society should contribute to long-term development approaches, rather than be expected to simply plug short-term gaps.

A report released today by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies calls for a rethink on how humanitarian assistance in Africa is funded and administered.

First, it calls for communities to be better included in the assistance given to them. Too often, aid - particularly the kind given during emergencies - is imposed on communities. This is rarely sustainable.

In our estimation, there is far too much focus on reactive, emergency aid. So much more could be done to address the root causes of hunger or of suffering inflicted by disasters.

As the report says, continued over-reliance on reactive disaster response will contribute less and less to lasting solutions,. Partly as a result of climate change, financial crises and population growth, aid organisations will require more and more money to meet just the basic needs of affected communities.

More funding and focus need to be directed towards tackling the root causes of vulnerability in Africa. Today, only a fraction of one per cent of total aid money goes towards disaster risk reduction - activities that seek out and address the often predictable and usually preventable factors that turn challenges into catastrophe. This needs to change.

The good news? There are already examples of how effective this approach can be. For communities that live in dry and infertile regions, investment in irrigation and diversification of crops and techniques can yield extraordinary results. Malawi is one such example.

So, yes: Let's move away, where possible, from only addressing crises after the fact. The solutions exist and they are dramatically cheaper than the alternative of emergency appeals and massive response operations.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. The answer is not to do away with relief. The truth is that we can - and should - do both. The humanitarian imperative demands that we give food to people who are starving and provide relief to communities that have been battered by disasters.

So, in the Horn of Africa and in other parts of the continent affected by hunger or disasters, let's avoid politicising or theorising the suffering of people. Let's spend the acute initial months ensuring that people don't die.

And then, once the situation has stabilised, let's spend time and money attacking the root causes of this despair, and let's try to ensure that it doesn't recur.

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* The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of Jimma Times. To send articles to JT, contact us for more detail. Bekele Geleta is the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.