How El Niño can be life changing.

It’s happened: winter has finally come to Australia. No more shorts and t-shirts like we were donning up until a month ago, and it’s the time of year when we struggle to remember to take an umbrella with us when we walk out the door.

While we’re mourning the loss of our extended summer and beginning to deal with the colder weather and increased rainfall, a change in weather means something very different for a little girl on the other side of the world.

Meet Sofia.

12-year-old Sofia carrying water back to her home in the Afar Region, Ethiopia. Image: provided.

This 12-year-old from Ethiopia has experienced one of the worst droughts to hit her country in decades. With access to fresh water scarce, Sofia was faced with the challenge of walking 35km to the nearest water point to her community, in order to collect water for her family. She then had to make the return journey, carrying gallons of water with her.

Let’s just think about that for a moment: a 12-year-old child travelling 70km by foot. This journey would take days for a healthy adult, even without the burden of carrying all the additional weight of the water.

When I was 12, I was barely allowed to ride my bike around the block on my own, let alone walk what is further than the distance between Berowra and Cronulla – on opposite sides of Sydney – on my own.

How has this happened, that there is no clean water any closer to Sofia’s community, forcing her to sacrifice her studies and take on so much responsibility for her family?

It all comes down to the devastating effects that El Niño has had in the past year.

Ethiopia is experiencing one of its worst droughts in decades. The nation’s main rainy season, kiremt rains, which is responsible for over 80 per cent of Ethiopia’s agricultural yield, failed in 2015. This had devastating effects for those employed in the agricultural sector – a whopping 85 per cent of the population – many of whom have lost their incomes and are struggling to feed their families.

While this powerful El Niño weather event is now in decline, it continues to wreak havoc on their lives and livelihoods, including 435,000 children who are expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year. Food shortages are likely to worsen in the coming months and the humanitarian impacts may last well into 2017.

Nations in Eastern and Southern Africa have been some of the worst affected by El Niño, leaving 36 million people across the continent facing hunger.

Think about it: that’s almost double the population of Australia going hungry.

UNICEF has stepped in to help, and has already provided 300,000 people with access to safe water in 2016, but there’s still much work to be done to combat the consequences of El Niño.

A mother and her child line up in a long queue to get drinking water at Keroma Kebele (Sub-district) where water trucking is provided by UNICEF as an emergency response in Gewane, Ethiopia. Image: provided.

But what exactly is El Niño?

To explain it simply, El Niño is extreme climate change that is caused by a change in the ocean temperature, which is further exacerbated by tropical winds.

In Eastern and Southern Africa, El Niño has brought drought. Long, intense periods without rainfall have caused the earth to dry up, meaning it’s near impossible to grow food, causing widespread malnutrition. Fresh water sources dry up too, causing mass water shortages that lead to dehydration.

El Niño often gives way to La Niña, which causes huge rains and mass floodings. So once communities have begun to deal with the consequences of drought, La Niña brings a whole new set of problems: waterborne diseases, destruction of infrastructure, and loss of livestock and human lives. It also affects agriculture, causing precious nutrient-rich topsoil that farmers rely on to grow crops to be washed away. La Niña is expected to hit the region in September this year.

What does this mean for communities?

“In East and Southern Africa successive years of drought and failed crops have left millions of people without such basic necessities as food and water,” says Felicity Wever, the Head of International Programs at UNICEF Australia, “It is something we here in Australia, where most people are not reliant on growing their own food, find it very hard to relate to.”

“In March I visited drought affected areas in Zimbabwe and was previously in the Somali region of Ethiopia, where millions of people are suffering food shortages as a result of the El Niño.”

When food is scarce and communities go hungry, it is often the children who suffer the most:

“At schools, I visited children who had sometimes only eaten one meal that day, or sometimes had gone more than one day without eating,” states Felicity.

“These kids are sleeping instead of learning, they’re missing school and this has ongoing implication on learning outcomes and their ability to continue passing and progressing through school,” comments Felicity.

And those are the lucky ones. Many others are pulled out of school to help support their families through working or foraging for food.

This is what happened to 9-year-old Zahara. She attended school up until the third grade, but has since quit and spends most of her day doing household chores instead.

Zahara Ali, 9, cooks breakfast in a rural village in the Dubti Woreda, Ethiopia. Image: provided.

As you can imagine, the demand on health services also becomes unbearable, with malnutrition, diarrhoea and other diseases overwhelming local clinics.

On 16 February 2016 in Malawi, Teresa Kanyika faced every mother’s worst nightmare: not knowing how she would manage to feed her 14-month-old son, Edward. That day, the pair ate the last of their food, which was only some fortified soya-corn.

Edward is severely malnourished, and Teresa believes that it is because she is unable to breastfeed him because she is so hungry. “I don’t have food to eat myself. This is affecting my child because I’m not producing enough breastmilk,” she says.

Teresa Kanyika and her 14-month-old son, Edward, eating the last of their fortified corn at their home in the Chikhwawa District, Malawi. Image: provided.

Teresa is struggling to feed her family after her vegetable garden was hard hit last year by severe flooding and by the current drought, which has left her unable to harvest any maize or vegetables from the garden. She does not know where they will get their next meal:

“It’s very difficult because I can’t even see a future for my children. Because how can I feed them when I don’t have food. I fear that one day my children will die because of hunger.”

In order to help children like Edward overcome their malnutrition, UNICEF provides them with Plumpy’Nut, a nutritious peanut paste fortified with vitamins and minerals. Three sachets a day can save a child’s life and bring them back to health in weeks. $30 could buy 52 sachets of Plumpy’Nut, and literally save a child’s life.

Felicity was incredibly moved by stories of mothers like Teresa during her time in Africa. “Apart from working for UNICEF, I also donate to UNICEF because as a mum I don’t want to see a world where children are suffering like this, simply because of where they are born,” says Felicity.

Apart from being used to save children from malnutrition, $30 can also buy enough water purification tablets to clean 18,500 litres and help stop the spread of deadly waterborne diseases, which would affect entire communities.

“It is incredibly hard to ignore the fact that mothers I speak to in developing countries want the same things for their children as I do for mine,” says Felicity, “I can really identify with them and I want to be part of the solution.”

Moved by these stories? Here’s what you can do to help.