The young mother sitting in the clinic on the edge of a shanty town in suburban Nairobi held out her hand to Australian MP Tania Lawrence and asked her to take her baby away.

Lawrence and six of her parliamentary colleagues were in the Kenyan capital as part of a week-long visit to see the famine and ­humanitarian crisis sweeping across the Horn of Africa and putting millions of lives at risk.

Their first visit was to a community clinic funded by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where health workers are screening for cervical cancer, a disease that kills more than 4000 Kenyan women a year, despite being entirely preventable.

In a noisy waiting room, the young mum introduced Lawrence to her baby Ismail, a gorgeous boy of a few months old, and asked her to take him away. She had little food, no money, and wanted him to have a chance at a better life.

“I was just walking through the clinic saying hello to a few people and she caught my eye and immediately started to tell me she doesn’t want to keep the baby, and asked could I take him,” Lawrence, a WA Labor MP, says later.

“She was desperate. It was really a symbol of what we would see throughout the whole trip.

“She said: ‘I don’t want the baby, I can’t look after him, I don’t have shelter, I don’t have enough food’.

“It was desperately sad. Obviously we see poverty in different forms but on this trip we encountered poverty and people living in the most desperate situations.”

It was the first of numerous difficult and emotional interactions the MPs would have as they took part in the Australian Regional Leadership Initiative, a program run by Save the Children Australia and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to allow MPs to see first-hand the impact of foreign aid.

Some of those experiences were uplifting – the MPs cheered and clapped when a 27-year-old man raised his arms in triumph when the bandages were removed from his eye and he could see clearly again following a cataract removal at a clinic run and funded by the Fred Hollows Foundation, established by pioneering Australian eye surgeon and philanthropist Fred Hollows.

James Stevens, a Liberal MP from South Australia, was standing beside the young man when his sight was restored in a rudimentary community hospital close to the Kakuma refugee camp in remote northwestern Kenya.

“There is no substitute for witnessing directly the enormous ­humanitarian challenges facing the Horn of Africa,” Stevens says.

“A prolonged drought and ongoing conflict have placed millions of people at risk of severe famine. The impact on young children of malnutrition is particularly confronting and heartbreaking.

“To see the impact of Australians in the midst of this crisis is a source of pride. The Fred Hollows Foundation is changing lives through its work to restore sight to so many who simply don’t have access to the medical services we take for granted.”

In another positive experience, the MPs met female beekeepers, or apiarists, who are being trained and helped to establish hives by an Australian government grant encouraging people in drought-stricken Turkana County to establish alternative food and income sources.

NSW Nationals MP Michael McCormack inspected the hives and the small honey extraction ­facility, and chatted to the women, who have gained a degree of financial independence and food security from the program.

“The apiarists of Turkana West are showing what can be done to boost agriculture, provide a good food source for local markets and who knows where in the future, and lift their life aspirations,” he says.

“The fact nearly 60 per cent of Kenyan apiarists are women is truly inspirational. This is an initiative which has limitless potential against a backdrop of hardship and poverty, so every effort must be made to help it succeed, which, given the resilience and the spirit of these people, I’m sure it will.”

But for every positive interaction the MPs had, there were many more encounters that were desperately sad.

As the Turkana County suffers through its worst drought in 40 years, the land has degraded into sand and large numbers of livestock have died.

In a remote village in the Lomil community area, Save the Children and the World Food Program run a nutrition clinic, handing out sachets of high-energy ready-to-use therapeutic food to people who do not have enough to eat and are suffering malnutrition.

Women, elderly men and a large number of children sit listlessly in the dirt as they receive the food – which in some cases will save their lives.

The World Food Program says the Horn of Africa is headed for a record fifth straight failed rainfall season and that 4.4 million people in Kenya alone are suffering “crisis levels of hunger”.

More than a million women and children need treatment for malnutrition. Some of them were at the clinic. Children and babies with thin limbs and hollow cheeks were weighed in a bucket on a rudimentary scale. Many were dangerously underweight.

Tasmanian Liberal senator Claire Chandler says it is “simply heartbreaking” to see such widespread and devastating hunger, particularly among children.

“To see pictures and video footage of this suffering is one thing; to witness it in person and see the desperation on the people’s faces is incredibly confronting,” she says.

“It is clear to me that while current humanitarian programs on the ground in countries like Kenya are having an impact, more needs to be done to alleviate the impact of malnutrition, and extreme poverty more broadly, in the region.”

Save the Children Australia chef executive Mat Tinkler led the delegation to Kenya and says an “absolute catastrophe” is developing in the Horn of Africa.

“The region is in the grips of the worst hunger crisis in decades, and it is threatening to become the defining humanitarian crisis of our time,” he says.

“This is the devastating consequence of multiple, concurrent disruptions affecting food supply – including climate change and the conflict in Ukraine – and the Covid-19 pandemic increasing pressure on already fragile health systems.

“The Horn of Africa has already experienced four failed rainy seasons and is now bracing for a fifth. Without urgent action there is little doubt that even more people will face catastrophic hunger, disease, displacement – and even death.

“Families have been forced to live without water, food, shelter, or an ability to earn money. It’s heart-wrenching, and it shouldn’t be like this.”

Tinkler says the Horn of Africa is the epicentre of a global hunger crisis, with 345 million people across 81 countries facing acute food insecurity.

“Kenya is grappling with the severe consequences of drought and food insecurity, including the loss of around 2.4 million livestock, leading to growing hunger and the spread of disease.

“Neighbouring Somalia is on the brink of famine which, along with conflict, is pushing thousands of hungry people from their homes in search of food, water and medical care.

“Just since September, about 20,000 people have sought to escape the dire situation in Somalia by crossing the border into Kenya,” Tinkler says. “It can be difficult to fully comprehend the scale of this crisis. The number of people facing hunger in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia is bigger than the entire population of Australia, which is simply staggering.”

It has been almost 40 years since the dreadful famine in Ethiopia that stretched from 1983 to 1985 and in which as many as 1.2 million people starved to death. The world got behind the people of Ethiopia through fundraising spearheaded by singer Bob Geldof, who rounded up the world’s top-selling pop stars and recorded a song, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which was released in December 1984 and raised millions of dollars.

This time, the public’s attention has been consumed by the Covid pandemic and the war and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, with scant attention paid to the disaster in Africa that is killing one person every 48 seconds.

“We know Australians are fatigued by the successive crises of a turbulent few years, and now the soaring cost of living is creating pressure at home too,” Tinkler says.

“Charity might start at home, but it can’t end there. Australians know this and come together to help others in need, whether that’s during a disaster at home or on the other side of the world. Not-for-profit organisations providing humanitarian assistance to countries like Kenya and Somalia have been buoyed by the generosity of the Australian public in 2022.

“When Somalia was hit by a terrible famine in 2011 that claimed more than 250,000 lives, Australia was among the largest donors globally with a $120m contribution.

“The government’s (recent) $15m commitment to the current hunger crisis is a step in the right direction, but the world is risking a deadly repeat of 2011 without a major increase in funding to help address both the immediate needs and root causes of food insecurity.”

Matt Burnell, a South Australian Labor MP and former farmer, pitched in to help, dragging a barrel of water from a water bore across a dry creek bed and up to a village, a collection of domed huts made from twigs. It was hot, dusty and difficult work and something families, often children, do every day.

He says it was “extremely confronting” to see how difficult life is for people trying to eke out a living in the drought, where overgrazing has occurred, soil is virtually non-existent and the land is reduced to sand.

Livestock, so important for the Turkana people, who are nomadic pastoralists, have died in huge numbers, apart from a few hardy goats.

“Some of the local people we’ve spoken to haven’t seen rain for four years,” Burnell says.

He was intrigued by the water barrels the locals had made, comprising two buckets and a metal handle, which allowed them to roll rather than carry the heavy containers back to their communities, often kilometres away from the bores, in temperatures above 35C.

The Australian Regional Leadership Initiative has been running for the past eight years, with MPs visiting people working on the front line of humanitarian disasters or in developing nations, to gain a better understanding of how foreign aid is spent and how it can ­impact communities.

In Kenya, the visit took in the teeming Kakuma refugee camp, home to 250,000 displaced people; saw large-scale food distribution undertaken by the World Food Program and the International Committee of the Red Cross; and saw some niche programs working to fix local problems, such as turning landfill into compost, and spoiled avocados into a fuel source.

“We wanted MPs to escape the Canberra bubble and witness first-hand the drivers of devastating levels of hunger and understand that Australia has a role to play in responding to the crisis,” Tinkler says.

“It was also important to show how solutions to these challenges lie in the very communities they are impacting, if resources are available to allow them to scale their work.”

Same-sex relationships are still illegal in Kenya, and Labor senator Louise Pratt from Western Australia welcomes the decision by the Global Fund to support Ishtar, a small support service that caters for transgender and men-who-have-sex-with-men communities in Nairobi.

The clients of the centre may not find it safe to visit doctors or reach out to others but can come together in Ishtar’s safe space for companionship and support, as well as screening and treatment to tackle diseases including HIV.

“The Global Fund funds organisations like this,” Pratt says. “Happily we just topped up the Global Fund with $260m but there’s always more work to do. We have seen some really devastating circumstances for families and communities here in Kenya and it really shows how high the stakes are when it comes to foreign aid.”

In September, Australia contributed $266m to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Less than 10km from central Nairobi is the Dandora landfill, the city’s largest tip, a stinking, smouldering mess of rubbish that was deemed full in 2001, but still receives thousands of tonnes of rubbish a day. Around its edges live 200,000 people in makeshift huts, with thousands of mainly women and children picking over the tip for anything they can sell, use or eat.

Along the street, scavenged items are sold in rudimentary markets. It’s hard to believe there’s much of a demand for second-hand toilet brushes taken from the tip, but for communities right on the edge, every shilling helps.

Following a visit to a local hospital, set up on the fringes of the tip after a campaign by women living in the informal settlements, Labor MP from Queensland Graham Perrett says the experience was confronting.

“Obviously we’re seeing some people living a pretty rough life,” he says. But he “took hope” from the efforts of the women who banded together to establish the hospital.

Perrett says the visit showed him the benefits of well-placed and well-used foreign aid, where aid agencies relied on local knowledge and local labour to “transform lives and make communities more resilient”.

“I took great heart from what we saw in some of the toughest parts in Kenya and here in the middle of a city of six million people as well.”

The Australian’s visit to Kenya was facilitated by Save the Children Australia and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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