Following the Flow of Aid

27 Apr 2022

Following the Flow of Aid

How the war in Europe affects the food supply in Africa

Re: Tjada McKenna (MBA 2002)

Topics: Society-War Management-Crisis Management Social Enterprise-Nonprofit Organizations

Courtesy Mercy Corps

In April, Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna (MBA 2002) paid a visit to Poland to see firsthand the plight of Ukrainian people fleeing their country. The humanitarian aid organization that McKenna leads has been partnering with local groups in Poland to provide food, shelter, and services to people crossing the border from Ukraine. But the experience also underscored for McKenna some of the “uncomfortable truths of aid work,” according to an April article in SeattleMet.

“You’d see people getting off the trains coming across the border, and you saw support being rushed to some and others being ignored,” McKenna says. Indeed there have been reports of Africans and other minorities like Ukrainian Romani communities being turned away at the border. To address that, Mercy Corps has set up a partnership with a Polish organization to provide shelter and support for these third-country nationals, who might not otherwise connect with services.

McKenna also extended her visit to include Iraq and Lebanon, where food prices are hitting record highs as a result of the war in Ukraine. About 80 percent of Lebanon’s wheat typically comes from Ukraine, and areas in Africa—some of which were already experiencing devastating drought and food insecurity—also rely on crops to flow from Russia and Ukraine.

As the world's attention is understandably focused on Europe, people in Africa are experiencing the consequences of the war. Mercy Corps distributes food through the World Food Programme, which has reduced the assistance it provides to people by half as a result of the food shortages. “You have mothers, who tend to live in multigenerational households, trying to figure out how to feed families of four, six, eight people on those rations,” McKenna is quoted as saying.

To read more about McKenna and her work at Mercy Corps, see the December 2021 Bulletin story about her.

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