Across East Africa, a wide range of factors, including armed conflict, extended droughts, economic shocks, and rising food prices, pose an ongoing threat to food security for people in the region over the coming months.

Since our Africa Drought and Famine Fund was launched in 2017, our vetted nonprofit partners working in East Africa have been assisting communities at risk of famine improve the resiliency of their food production systems. Thanks to generous support from donors like you, our partners have reported significant recent progress in combating food insecurity in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan:

• Horn of Africa Development Initiative is currently working with 152 villages in Marsabit County in northern Kenya, where they are improving food security through direct cash transfers to families struggling to meet their food needs. They're also supplying families with rainwater collection tanks, a vital source of drinking water when access to safe sources can be scarce.
• In southeastern Kenya, Makindu Children's Program is distributing 187 pregnant Galla goats to households in Makueni County. The goats—indigenous to Kenya and renowned for their high milk production in arid climates—will provide families not only with the nutrition from the milk but also the opportunity to earn additional income by selling their extra milk. They're also organizing an educational workshop on animal husbandry in coordination with the Kenyan government so that the households receiving the goats are well-prepared to successfully raise the animals.
• Kids for Kids has expanded their work in Sudan, where they will now be partnering with eight new villages in remote areas of Darfur. Facing the challenge of a failed harvest last year, Kids for Kids is working with these communities to identify the families in greatest need of assistance. They are also continuing their goat loan program and have distributed hand pumps to villages struggling with access to safe drinking water.
• Seed Programs International focuses on vegetable gardening as a strategy to boost nutrition, income, and local leadership in East Africa, and sees gardens as key to building communities' resilience to future food crises. To that end, they've partnered with Grow East Africa to support a vegetable gardening project led by a woman's group from a camp for internally displaced people in Ethiopia's Burji District. Their partner has also helped the group become a government-licensed cooperative, which presents more opportunities for growth and improved livelihoods.

Your donation has helped make these and many more stories of partnership and progress possible. Thank you for supporting community-led disaster relief efforts, and for doing so by donating cash—the most effective way to help in times of crisis.

With gratitude,
Will + the GlobalGiving Team

We now have the full picture of the impact of the Sep. 28 earthquake and tsunami on Sulawesi and the scope of the damage has expanded significantly.

The government of Central Sulawesi reported in January that in their final count, the disaster had claimed 4,340 lives—nearly double earlier estimates. Almost half of these deaths occurred in Palu, the coastal city where post-earthquake soil liquefaction resulted in widespread destruction. In total, more than 42,000 buildings suffered damage, including 3,683 that were completely destroyed.

In response, the generosity of GlobalGivers like you has continued to fund community-led relief and recovery efforts—4,347 members of our community have now raised $604,905 in support of our vetted nonprofit partners in Indonesia.

In this update, we'd like to share the progress being made by one of the partners your donation supported: Yayasan Usaha Mulia (YUM). They are an Indonesian NGO based in Jakarta that works to provide impoverished Indonesians with access to healthcare and education, as well as support for community development initiatives. When the earthquake struck, their staff shifted gears to join disaster response efforts.

Yayasan Usaha Mulia recently reported on their team's third visit to Palu and Donggala. They spent a week distributing food, water, hygiene supplies, clothing, educational materials, and three electric generators for communities still without power. Their team was able to visit a number of villages in the area over the course of the week, where they consulted with the community to assess needs and arrange support where possible.

In Biromaru, they organized a trauma healing session (pictured above) for 200 children living in camps for families displaced by the disaster. Their team distributed hygiene supplies, food, and 150 relief kits in Tanjung Padang, contributed $1,000 to the construction of temporary shelters in Sirenja, and provided clothing and food to families in Amal, a remote community badly damaged by landslides. They also made their third visit to Saloya, where they observed that refugees there had established a school in one of the relief tents and the YUM team organized activities for the camp's children.

Your donation has helped make stories like these shared by Yayasan Usaha Mulia possible. We're incredibly grateful for that support because, after a disaster like this one, recovery efforts led by people who live and work in affected communities are often underfunded. In fact, research has shown that less than 3% of global disaster relief funding goes to community-led nonprofits. This means some of the most vulnerable people affected by disasters get overlooked.

By giving to our Indonesia Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund, you’re helping change that reality. You can learn more about our unique approach to disaster relief by visiting the Disaster Recovery Network at GlobalGiving.

We look forward to sharing more stories of the ongoing recovery in Indonesia with you in the coming months.

With gratitude,
Will + the GlobalGiving Team

With support from GlobalGivers like you, who've raised more than $750,000 for our Hurricane Michael Relief Fund, our nonprofit partners have been able to help affected communities along Florida's Panhandle make great strides recovering and rebuilding after the storm.

Habitat for Humanity's local chapters in Bay County and Chipola supported early relief efforts in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, performing damage assessments and damage repairs, removing debris, and distributing tools and construction materials to homeowners. Now they're partnering with moderate-to-low income hurricane-affected households to build new homes and perform critical home repairs over the next year and a half.

Thanks to backing from this relief fund, Hearts & Hands Disaster Recovery’s teams will be able to help at least 10 households return to their homes in 2019. Their program is designed to fill in the gaps for people whose homes were uninsured or underinsured when Michael struck, and are not able to recover on their own.

After helping the people of their home state recover from Hurricane Florence in early September, teams of veterans from the North Carolina Military Veterans Hall of Fame traveled to Florida to join emergency relief efforts after Hurricane Michael just a few weeks later. In the following months, their teams have been making the trip back to the Panhandle from North Carolina every two weeks to help families rebuild their hurricane-damaged homes, and are continuing to distribute clothing, food, water filtration kits, and construction supplies to families in need.

The Florida Response Program volunteers from All Hands and Hearts have worked on 68 hurricane-damaged homes to date, and are now helping to repair the heavily damaged Boys and Girls Club of Bay County, which has been closed for safety concerns since the storm.

The generosity you and so many others have shown by supporting this relief fund has helped make this vital recovery work possible. Thank you for standing with the people of the Florida Panhandle after a storm that cost so many people so much. We'll be back in your inbox in the coming months with more stories of progress.

With gratitude,
Will + the GlobalGiving Team