No, the images shared are old photos that have been used to illustrate the current drought in Turkana County. - iVerify Kenya

No, the images shared are old photos that have been used to illustrate the current drought in Turkana County.

Misleading

The images shared on social media claiming to show the current drought in Turkana are not current, but rather old photos used to illustrate the current drought in the County.

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Verified Nov, 08 2022

Claim

Photos depicting hungry people in Turkana County during the current drought.

Rating Justification

The iVerify Network of Fact-Checking Desks has fact-checked this content and established that it is Misleading.

To arrive to this conclusion, the iVerify Network of Fact-Checking Desks has conducted the following process. We conducted a reverse image search on the images and discovered that they were taken at different times.

We discovered that the first image, of a woman and two children feeding on dry bones, was captured and shared in an article on the World Vision website on December 18, 2017, on 5 of the worst disasters in 2017, when the mother and children attempted to eat the marrow from a donkey bone in Turkana county, northern Kenya in 2017.

An image search by Bing reveals that the second photo of a Turkana man wearing traditional Turkana clothing and three children standing next to him was first uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, a media repository of open images, sounds, videos and other media, on December 6, 2007 and transferred from Wikipedia.

The iVerify Network of Fact-Checking Desks also discovered that the third image of kids lining up was taken by photographer Rhett Butler on October 4, 2017 in Turkana (Northern Kenya) and shared on Mongabay.com, a non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform based in the United States.

Through a reverse image search engine using TinEye, the fourth image of a child fetching water from a shallow well, while the mother and others watch, reveals that the image was first shared in an article by The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, on October 28, 2019, and was captured by Emmanuel Dayan, while residents were fetching water from a well in Nanam, Turkana, as Turkana authorities were in talks with a Saudi investor to build a desalination plant in the drought-stricken area sitting on top of a vast reservoir of salty water.

The fifth image, of a woman seated with a child in what appears to be a manyatta, was shared on September 22, 2021, in an article published by Breaking Kenya News about a 78-year-old woman from Kodekode village, Turkana East sub-county, who had been surviving solely on boiled water with her 10-year-old granddaughter for several months.

We discovered through a search by Bing, that the sixth image of a woman with a large number of children was first shared in an article by Africa Metro on February 22, 2017, when the United Nations (UN) demanded action as famine loomed in Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.

Through Yandex, a search engine, we discovered that the seventh image of two people seated in a manyatta was captured in Turkana and first shared in an article by Capital News on October 11, 2011, when Kenya was ranked among the countries facing serious hunger challenges in the world in a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute, which placed Kenya in position 50 in the Global Hunger Index (GHI).

A Google reverse image search also revealed that the eighth image, of a woman and a child next to a manyatta, was first shared on March 19, 2019 in an article by Kenyans.co.ke. when Kenyans from Turkana County, ravaged by drought in the county and other areas of the country. The image is courtesy of Roncliffe Odit – BBC. Renée Ngamau, Chairperson of Amnesty International Kenya, retweeted the image on her official Twitter account.

The ninth image, according to a reverse image search, was shot on March 15, 2019 and first shared in an article by The Star on March 18, and is of Mr. Lochuryo Lemeri, 79, with his grandson as they faced death due to hunger and are from Kamasuk village in Tiaty, Baringo County.

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