African countries and donors pledged more than $350 million Thursday at a fund-raiser in the Ethiopian capital to help millions facing starvation in the Horn of Africa's worst drought in decades.

Famine is set to spread to two new southern Somali regions with millions of people reeling from extreme drought, the top UN humanitarian aid official for the war-torn nation warned on Wednesday.

The growth of the world's urban population is posing an ever growing challenge to provide city dwellers access to clean water and sanitation, a study released Sunday said.

Britain said on August 17 that hundreds of thousands of children could starve to death in Somalia if the international community did not ramp up its response to the famine there, and pledged a furt

The famine in the Horn of Africa is manmade - the result of artificially high prices for food and civil conflict, the World Bank's lead economist for Kenya Wolfgang Fengler told Reuters Tuesday.

The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced

Sometimes the British overplay their importance in international affairs, but in the humanitarian crisis in east Africa they have contributed more than most.

At a streetside kiosk in Isiolo, the price of camel bones for soup has jumped 250 per cent this year to 100 shillings ($1.10) a kilo, straining the pockets of many in the drought-hit eastern Kenyan