In March 2017, just 6 years after the drought that claimed a ¼ of a million peoples lives, another critical level famine alert was raised in Somalia that severely affected as much as 6.2 million nearly 50% of the population. With very little international aid preparing to step in to help and assist, iHeartAfrica teamed up with Lenny Kravitz, Jerome Jarre Turkish Airlines and the Ben Stiller Foundation to raise nearly 3 Million USD to implement an emergency aid program. Over the course of several months throughout 2017 the team worked tirelessly to recruit the help necessary to procure family sized food and water parcels to help combat malnutrition, starvation and dehydration.
The parcels included flour, rice, dates, cow peas, sugar, maize and powdered milk which were sourced as locally as we possibly providing the circumstance.
The project was officially completed in Decemeber 2017 when we used the remainder of the raised funding to establish a sustainable irrigation program in Jubaland. The project is one of the largest sustainable projects in the area completed in the last decade and will help service around 1/66th of the entire population.
