26.5 million people in East Africa suffer from the lack of food and water caused by endemic drought in Ethiopia, Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, and Uganda. Several Churches in Europe have mobilised to assist these populations. Caritas Switzerland has launched an appeal: 2 million Swiss francs have been spent so far in West Africa to assist over 100,000 people, but “assistance needs to be increased over the next few months” to deliver food and water, because “the autumn harvest has been destroyed by the drought too”. The Bishops of Ireland have organised an extraordinary collection on 22-23 July: the money raised will go to the Development Agency of the Catholic Church Trócaire. “At the global level, this crisis has received scant attention. Requests for help are underfunded. The UN has received only 37% of the funds necessary to tackle the crisis in Somalia. The world is distracted by the actions of a few powerful politicians while millions of people are suffering in silence in West Africa”, the Bishop of Cloyne and President of Trócaire, Mgr. William Crean, decried. Even in the Church of Sweden a campaign has been running for some weeks now to raise awareness of “the worst humanitarian crisis since 1945”; the goal is to “guarantee access to food and water” to as many people as possible. And fourteen Dutch NGOs, including Cordaid, have again launched an appeal for South Sudan and its 3.9 million refugees.