Yes­ter­day, Kenya made head­lines for the mil­lions of starv­ing peo­ple there. Today, a coali­tion of Cana­dian aid agen­cies and advo­cates broad­ened their scope to all of East Africa.

Cit­ing the wars in Soma­lia, and the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, the Cana­dian coali­tion says that 20 mil­lion peo­ple are starv­ing in East Africa. The group says that years of drought added on top of the vio­lence has led to the starvation.

From The National Post, writer Peter Good­speed relays the statement.

The Human­i­tar­ian Coali­tion, which includes CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Quebec and Save the Chil­dren Canada, warns East Africa faces “a per­fect storm of crop fail­ures, a multi-year lack of rain, con­flicts and polit­i­cal tur­moil,” which now threat­ens 20 mil­lion peo­ple with severe hunger.

In Soma­lia, where recent fight­ing between Islamist rebels and Somali gov­ern­ment forces backed by African Union peace­keep­ers has claimed the lives of 2,000 civil­ians, half the pop­u­la­tion already needs food assis­tance and one in five chil­dren is severely malnourished.

But fierce new fight­ing in Mogadishu now threat­ens a fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion in the human­i­tar­ian sit­u­a­tion and is send­ing a fresh wave of refugees fleeing.

On Mon­day, the United Nations High Com­mis­sioner for Refugees announced that more than 250,000 peo­ple have been dis­placed by fight­ing in Soma­lia since May, push­ing the num­ber of dis­placed peo­ple in the coun­try to 1.55 million.

Accord­ing to the aid agen­cies, most of the dis­placed are women and chil­dren who are liv­ing with­out access to water, san­i­ta­tion or med­ical care in crowded and badly man­aged camps in Soma­lia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

The Dadaab camp in northeastern Kenya, which was intended to hold 90,000 peo­ple, is now one of the world’s largest sin­gle con­cen­tra­tions of refugees, with almost 300,000 people.

Oxfam offi­cials recently described the camp as “barely fit for humans,” say­ing half the peo­ple in the camp have no access to water and women and chil­dren rarely have access to ade­quate latrines.

Yet Oxfam pre­dicts another 100,000 refugees may flee increased fight­ing in Soma­lia this year and seek safety in Kenya.

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