Mena Suvari is urging her fans to donate to UNICEF's campaign to end the famine in East Africa.
“Help Humanity Half a million children are going to die of malnutrition if we don’t act,” the star tweeted yesterday.
The epicentre of the drought has hit the poorest people in the region in an area straddling the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia where families rely heavily on livestock for survival. In some parts of the region, up to 60 percent of their herds have already died while the remainder are either sick or dangerously underweight. The price of animals has plummeted by half while the cost of cereals has soared. In Somalia the price of a main staple sorghum has risen by a massive 240 percent since this time last year.
Malnutrition rates in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are alarming and well above emergency levels – in some places five times higher than crisis threshold. In Dolo Ado, a camp in southern Ethiopia for Somali refugees, malnutrition rates are the highest recorded in this region since the nineties.
Other stars to appeal to their fans for donations include Ewan McGregor – who recorded a special video – as well as Kristin Davis, who visited the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya with Oxfam.
Earlier this month, stars such as Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel and Lauren Laverne signed an open letter to raise awareness of the humanitarian disaster.
