[Woman carrying baby on her back in the Sahelian Zone of West Africa during drought]

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A woman in the Sahel carries a baby slung on her back, a common sight in the drought years of the early 1970s. The Sahel is the semi-arid belt stretching across West Africa south of the Sahara, where a series of droughts beginning in the late 1960s led to crop failures, livestock losses and widespread hunger. This photograph was made in 1973, during the worst stretch of that crisis, and was credited to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S. Agency for International Development, both of which documented the emergency and the relief efforts that followed. The image is useful for its quiet record of how families carried on daily life through hardship.

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