As drought becomes increasingly common, farmers worldwide are struggling to maintain crop yields. In the United States, farmers are experiencing the most severe drought in more than a half-century. As a result, global corn, wheat, and soybean prices rose in July and August, and remain high.

But the severe dry spell parching croplands across the US is only the latest in a global cycle of increasingly frequent and damaging droughts. In Africa’s Sahel region, millions of people are facing hunger for the third time since 2005. Lack of rain in the region and volatile global food prices have made a bad situation worse. Indeed, it is the world’s poor – particularly those in rural areas – that suffer the most from these combined factors.

Accurate information is the oxygen that keeps democracy breathing. It is the key to ensuring a government’s probity, and to monitoring its relations with the large corporations that drive modern economies. Without accurate information, a country’s citizens are at the mercy of whatever potentially corrupt group happens to be controlling public agencies and making and enforcing the law.

Millions of South Africans suffered the consequences of a lack of information – and considerable disinformation – during the secretive apartheid era. But the country learned from that experience. South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution guarantees the right to public-sector information and, in many cases, private business information as well. South Africa adopted a freedom of information law in 2000, five years before the United Kingdom did.

The news that Yale University has agreed to return thousands of artifacts that one of its researchers took from Peru in 1911 reminded me of a party that I attended recently – one that I had to leave prematurely.

An African friend had invited me to the event, at an acquaintance’s home. The host, a wealthy American, proudly displayed his collection of paintings and sculptures. As he showed us around, there was one object that appeared to be African, but I wasn’t sure; on occasion, I have identified art as African only to learn that it was, in fact, Native American.

Drought, famine, refugees, piracy, and the violence and terrorism endemic to the shattered city of Mogadishu, a capital ruined by civil war: these are the images that flash through peoples’ minds nowadays when they think of the Horn of Africa. Such perceptions, however, are not only tragically one-sided; they are short-sighted and dangerous.

Behind the stock images of a region trapped in chaos and despair, economies are growing, reform is increasingly embraced, and governance is improving. Moreover, with Yemen’s government imploding across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa’s strategic significance for maritime oil transport has become a primary global security concern. In short, the Horn of Africa is too important to ignore or to misunderstand.