Anne O'Mahoney, Country Director, Kenya, Concern Worldwide

"The hope is that rain will come. It is now due: if it fails again, it will be devastating. It is no coincidence that the word for rain in the Maasai language is the same as that for God."

Kenya is currently in the grip of a severe drought that has killed crops, crippled the country's production of food, and caused serious shortages of affordable food in urban areas. But the pastoralist communities in Kenya's rural areas are being hit hardest and most severely. Pastoralists depend on their animals for survival. Their livestock need grass - and the grass needs rain. When the rains fail the cattle die. They are dying like flies at the moment. The Maasai culture is proud and deep. They have seen drought before, but where in the 70's they expected and prepared for drought every 10 years, now the droughts are hitting every two to three years. There is no time to recover and rebuild their stock before the next one hits. The current one is particularly bad, for many the worst in living memory.

The global economic crisis is hitting Kenya hard: floriculture exports and tourism, the pillars of the Kenyan economy, are suffering as Europeans buy fewer roses and take cheaper holidays. Flower pickers who earn less than $3 a day are being laid off by the thousands.

The increase in unemployment in Europe and the US is affecting the Kenyans who have left to find work abroad, leaving them with less money to send home to their families in Kenya. The maize harvest in late summer was far below what was expected. This was a big blow: we were hoping that a good harvest would reduce the price of maize for the slum populations in Nairobi, who saw the price of their staple food double in the last year - while their already inadequate income shrank. In Kenya there is no social welfare and no safety nets of any kinds. If you don't have money, you don't eat. The poorest of the poor are now struggling even harder to survive. The pastoralists - the colorful Maasai, the Rendele, the Borana peoples - face a threat to their very way of life. They are at the coal face of climate change. Suffering the impact of ever-increasing cycles of drought.

Concern works with pastoralist communities to help them manage their own resources and to try to reduce their vulnerability to drought and hunger. My teams in the field work with community members to install water points on animal and people migration routes, to develop and improve their skills in animal breeding and livestock-care practices, and to provide them with alternative, "off-farm" opportunities for generating income for those who want a different way of life. After only a couple of years, I am beginning to see some really positive results in the fight against hunger by way of this program and others. I witness a lot of hardship, but what I also see is the evidence of possibility. These families live on less than $1 a day, but they are able to do a lot with very little. And Concern's willingness to build their capacity and invest in their potential to help themselves is vital. We are facing tough choices in this climate of budget cuts and financial turmoil. If this program is cut, we risk undoing all of that positive change.

In the rural district of Kajiado, where the impact of the drought is severe, Concern is providing individual families with food distributions and other vital support during this difficult time. But there aren't enough resources to reach all of those in need. The Maasai way is for individual families to share everything they have with the larger community. This means that their food supplies do not last as long as they should, and it also means that there are more people contributing to the collective pot. But an unfortunate truth in crisis situations is that this sharing actually also spreads the risk. As one Maasai woman said to me when I accompanied my nutrition team to a visit to rural villages in Kajiado, "We will eat together for as long as we have food, then we will die together." That woman had only one cow remaining in the herd that her family depends upon for survival. It was corralled within thorn fencing beside her hut. The animal was emaciated and did not look as if it had long to live. She walked four hours a day to get water for the cow, and fed it by hand with maize from her own minimal food supply. This was the animal that was going to spearhead the renewal of the family herd. She could not allow it to die. It was her family's future.

The hope is that rain will come. It is now due: if it fails again, it will be devastating. It is no coincidence that the word for rain in the Maasai language is the same as that for God.

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