Drought in Northern Tanzania: Alert Tanzania
/ 2011

Tanzania, like most other African countries, is dependent on rain-fed agriculture, with more than 80% of its population depending on subsistence agriculture. Persistent droughts especially in the central and northern regions, have led to repeated seasons of food shortages. Northern Tanzania region is in the same zone with the drought-stricken regions of the Horn of Africa. More than 53 districts in the region (Shinyanga, Mwanza, Mara, Singida, Manyara, Arusha, Kilimanjaro and Dodoma) have been declared by the Tanzanian Government as facing critical food shortages. Like for most of the countries of Eastern and the Horn of Africa, the lingering drought is indeed, becoming the worst drought in memory. Families, both pastoralists and agriculturalists, are going hungry with less than a full meal a day. All over the northern Tanzanian region, crops dried up for another consecutive year, due to insufficient rains in the just-ended 2010-2011 farming ?masika? season. The looming hunger has also been exacerbated by drying of water sources.