Aid pledge

The United Nations has officially declared what many observers had suspected: the crisis in Somalia has devolved into famine. On the heels of that declaration, Shah told reporters at the Ifo camp that the United States government had pledged an additional $28 million to assist affected people in Somalia as well as recent refugees. The U.S. is already providing $431 million in aid.

But there are questions about whether the extra money will be enough to handle even those in Kenya's camps, let alone the millions outside the camps and in Ethiopia and Somalia. Wednesday, aid group Oxfam International accused Western governments of "willful neglect," saying barely a quarter of the $800 million needed to combat the famine had been delivered.

Al-Shabab

Shah told reporters that much of the international effort to mitigate the drought and address the humanitarian crisis had been blocked by the Somali insurgent group al-Shabab.

"It's no accident that the specific geographies that have been declared by the international community as an official famine are those areas where humanitarian actors simply have not been allowed to have access to the population," added Shah.

The famine has been declared for the regions of Lower Shabelle and southern Bakool, two strongholds of the al-Qaida-linked group. In the past al-Shabab has restricted humanitarian access to populations under their control, but recently said they were reversing that position in light of the current crisis.