Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN Millenium Project that aims to halve world poverty by 2015, said donor responses to urgent appeals for aid were important but do little to reduce a country or region's dependence on such help.

"We have to find ways quickly and urgently to take action now to save the lives of people that are in imminent risk and also make longer term investnments," Sachs said here as he kicked off a six-nation tour of Africa to review progress made on achieving the so-called Millenium Development Goals (MGDs).

"Without the support for real investments ... we are not going to save people," he told reporters. "The climate vulnerability is extreme and the population pressures are great and the vulnerability is profound."

Last week, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) issued a "special alert" for the Horn of Africa, appealing for assistance for some 11 million people in Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia who it said are at the brink of starvation.

That alert followed similar warnings that famine may engulf the region as Kenyan Red Cross and local officials reported that some 45 people, mostly children, had already died from malnutrition and related illness mainly in northeastern Kenya since December.

While calling for a multi-pronged approach to addressing the drought and other disasters, Sachs lamented the slow response by donors in making good on pledges made last year to double aid to poor countries by 50 billion dollars by 2010, much of it for medium- and long-term development projects in Africa, the world's poorest continent.

"This missing aid that was promised by donors for so long but not yet delivered is really a life and death issue," he said. "The finances in Africa are extraordinarily tight, the challenges on the ground are so high and these problems cannot be solved by the countries themselves."

"The donor community has not yet empowered these communities to make investment," said Sachs, who from Kenya will travel on to Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Mali. "That is the tragedy that needs to be overcome."

He said poor African nations had already fallen well behind interim benchmarks laid out to achieve the Millenium Development Goals by the 2015 deadline.

"The MDGs are way off track all through Africa," said Sachs. "Under the current trajectory they will not be achieved."

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