Somali refugees put water containers for the water distribution by French charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the Dadaab refugee camp, one of Africa's largest refugee camps in Kenya, on March 23. Rains have finally arrived but are now triggering flash floods.BOBB MURIITHI/AFP/Getty Images
The rains have finally arrived in parts of drought-stricken Somalia. But instead of bringing relief, the heavy downpour has triggered flash floods, adding further misery in a country already on the brink of famine.
The flooding destroyed or damaged the shelters of nearly 100,000 people, killing 21 and washing away crops and livestock in several regions of Somalia, according to reports by the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies this week.
The heavy rains are the latest extreme weather to wreak havoc in the Horn of Africa. Years of drought have left the soil so dry that it could not absorb most of the rain, the aid agency Save the Children said in a report on Thursday. And the overall level of rainfall is still much lower than normal this year, which means that the hunger emergency will persist.
The flooding arrived just days after a study warned that the worst drought in Somalia’s recent history will continue to inflict catastrophic damage for the next three months, causing a projected 135 deaths every day.
“These extreme weather events show the vulnerability of the Horn of Africa to the climate emergency, and how climate impacts and the hunger crisis are inextricably linked,” Save the Children said.
The drought, a result of six consecutive seasons of failed rains, is part of a wider crisis across the Horn of Africa region, where 23 million people are facing severe hunger. The most acute suffering is in Somalia. Nearly half of the population there needs humanitarian assistance, and about 3.8 million people have been forced to abandon their homes in a desperate search for food and safety, according to the UN.
Because so much of the country is ravaged by war or controlled by the Islamist insurgents known as al-Shabab, it has been difficult to keep track of deaths from the drought. But a new study, released in March by United Nations agencies and Somalia’s Ministry of Health, provides some of the first estimates of the toll.
The study calculates that the drought may have killed 43,000 people last year, making it the deadliest in Somalia since the 2011 famine, which killed a quarter-million people. Half of last year’s dead were likely to have been children under the age of five, it said.
The deaths are forecast to escalate in the first half of this year, continuing at least until the end of June, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on behalf of the UN agencies. This could mean as many as another 34,000 deaths, it said.
The disaster has been “exacerbated by extreme weather caused by climate change, political instability, ethnic tensions and insecurity … [and] rapidly increasing global food prices,” the study said.
The UN refugee agency appealed in February for US$137-million in life-saving aid for the millions of refugees and internally displaced people in the Horn of Africa. Last year, the agency received less than half of the financial assistance it said it required to respond to the drought.
Aid leaders are urging the international community to step up assistance. But countries around the world are turning inward and prioritizing domestic needs.
Danny Glenwright, president and chief executive of Save the Children Canada, recently visited some of the programs his organization runs in the Somalian city of Baidoa, which is experiencing the brunt of the hunger crisis. Mr. Glenwright said camps for internally displaced people are growing around the city, with people living in shelters made of sticks. Families arrive seeking medical treatment for their children or looking for food.
In one camp, he visited a mobile clinic that had previously been open once a week, but now runs for six days because of the demand. The sickest of the children who arrive there are moved to stabilization centres. Mr. Glenwright said he had visited one of the stabilization centres, also run by the organization. Every bed was full.
“These are kids who are sick, who are really suffering from malnutrition, and they need to be admitted into the hospital because if they’re not, they will die,” he said.
Mr. Glenwright said he met a mother who had walked 25 kilometres that morning with her sick baby to reach one his organization’s health facilities. He said there are hundreds of stories like hers, and that in many cases parents arrive only after their children have died.
“It’s really been heartbreaking to see so many of these sick children, who are facing the worst forms of malnutrition for something that they had no role in,” he said.
Last year, he said, the Canadian government contributed financial assistance to aid groups responding to the hunger crisis. But he noted that this year there were no new spending commitments for foreign aid in the federal budget.
“We just want Canada to walk its talk, because we worry that if Canada is not stepping up right now – as more and more children are facing starvation and famine in places like Somalia – then who will?”
Michael Dunford, the head of World Food Programme for Eastern Africa, visited Ottawa recently to raise the same issue with government officials and parliamentarians.
“The need, as it relates to meeting their basic food and nutrition requirements, is enormous and continues to grow,” he said. “The situation has literally never been so bad.”
Mr. Dunford said that, after the devastating famine in 2011, WFP put in early warning systems, invested in resilience and helped populations adapt. Meanwhile, the Somali government introduced its own social protection system, he said.
Mr. Dunford said the WFP scaled up its operations, increasing its reach from 1.5 million people to 4.5 million. That response was because of a massive injection of funding, he said, much of it from the U.S. government.
Unless that level of funding continues, his organization will be forced to downscale.
“We are constantly having to fundraise, and that’s very much one of the things that I’m doing here – trying to speak to the government, to the parliamentarians, to civil society to put this issue on the table.”