Development Aid, Drought and Coping Capacity

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals project set as its first ambitious goal to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, including halving the proportion of people worldwide that suffer from hunger by 2015. Nearly all developing countries managed to accomplish the latter target, denoting a remarkable improvement in global food security. However, the global rate of undernourished has recently been on the rise. The leading cause of growth in hunger is escalating violence in war-torn countries, compounded by climate-related shocks, notably drought. This policy brief summarizes the first attempt to systematically assess the implications of development aid for recipient populations’ environmental coping capacity following droughts across sub-Saharan Africa.