Off Media Radar, Famine Garners Few Donations

Relief organizations often have their biggest fundraising successes during major humanitarian crises like the famine in east Africa.

The Center on Philanthropy estimates that American nonprofit aid groups received $1.9 billion after the Asian tsunami of 2004, and $1.4 billion in 2010 after the earthquake that decimated Haiti.

But aid groups say that raising money to address the famine has been more like that for the flooding in Pakistan last year, when dollars trickled into nonprofit coffers slowly and never came close to reaching the amounts donated to address other disasters.