“The stories of the families I met in Baidoa,#Somalia, need to be heard by people around the world. Their children are dying. Their livelihoods are gone. Their suffering is immense. We fear it’s about to get worse. We can’t allow that to happen,” Martin Griffiths Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Somalia is currently experiencing a historical two year dry spell. Which, the country has not witnessed the magnitude of this kind of drought in more than 40 years. The current famine has forced more than 1 million people to be displaced and registered as such within the country.
According to the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee, “Famine is unfolding in two areas in the Bay region (Baidoa and Burhakaba districts) in South-Central Somalia, and will likely last until March 2023 if humanitarian aid is not significantly and immediately scaled up.”
Across the Horn of Africa, more than 20.5 million people are facing a dire hunger crisis. The UN predicts that, one and a half million children across Somalia will face acute malnutrition by October if aid is not given. “In a world of staggering wealth, it is unacceptable that people are dying of hunger. We must take action now,” Inter-Agency Standing Committee (ISAC).
“But at the moment today (5th of September 2022), we are in the last minute of the eleventh hour to save lives. The clock is running, and it will soon run out. But panic doesn’t help those who need and deserve our help. It is not a strategy. Providing more humanitarian assistance is. Somalia knows, tragically, about famine, Somalis know about crises of hunger. And in 2016 and 2017, the people of Somalia and their Government, helped by humanitarian agencies, held back and prevented a famine and we must hope that we will see this again now,” Martin Griffiths Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
