Morning Briefing

Psychological, organizational and budgetary factors contributed to why governments did not respond sooner to early famine warnings in the Horn of Africa, Hugo Slim, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford, says in this Guardian opinion piece. In a new report (.pdf), Save the Children and Oxfam "suggest that government officials were reluctant to call a crisis until there was a crisis"; that organizing "NGOs and U.N. agencies to agree the scale of a problem and then to act in concert is always going to be difficult"; and that, "[m]ore importantly, budgets are still divided too strictly between emergency and development funds," he writes.