In addition to the famine, insecurity and political crisis, Somalia, is suffering from drought. According to a report from the HIM y UNICEFIn 2022 alone, 43,000 people died, half of them children under five years of age.
The Horn of Africa has lost six rainy seasons, the experts took into account in this case the excess of deaths registered with respect to previous periods and conclude that, with the figures in hand, the current crisis is already being more deadly than the last. of the period 2017-2018. In addition, its end seems distant, according to the forecasts that also appear in this report.
Somalia will suffer famine before the end of the year
According to projections based on the report, only in the first half of 2023 up to 135 people will die per day, which means that in this semester the number of deaths will range between 18,100 and 34,200.
During the past year the daily mortality rate had increased from 0.33 to 0.38 deaths per 10,000 inhabitants; in 2023 the data would skyrocket to 0.42, being almost double in children under five years of age, according to what was published Europa Press.
crisis in somalia
The study, prepared by British institutes and endorsed by the Somali government itself, places the southern and central areas of the country as the epicenter of the crisis, with special incidence in the Bay, Bakool and Banadir regions. The Somali Minister of Health, Ali Hadji Adam Abubakar, appealed to the solidarity of the international community to “save lives” and “remove the risk of famine forever.”
Poverty-ravaged Somalia hit by historic locust plague
The representative of the WHO, Mamunur Rahman Malik, agreed that it is “a race against time” to prevent deaths that “are avoidable”, especially in vulnerable groups such as children. For the head of UNICEF in Somalia, Wafaa Saeed, the report published on Monday painted “a grim picture of the devastation” that brought drought to many homes.
The UN estimated that 7.9 million people need humanitarian aid in Somalia, almost half the population, due to a concatenation of crises that intermingle political instability, insecurity, extreme weather and, more recently, an increase in prices derived from a certain extent of the military offensive launched by Russia on Ukraine.
According to the United Nations, it is estimated that some 190 million children from 10 African countries They are most at risk from the convergence of three water-related threats: inadequate sanitation and hygiene; related diseases; and climate risks.
In first person
As published by the UN news portal, Osman Ibrahim Mohamed, a 70-year-old man who lives in a camp for internally displaced persons in Dolow, confessed that on the way between the temporary shelters he came across scattered animal corpses and bones. “All these animals killed by the drought were the livelihoods of many people,” he said.
For his part, Osman, who left the Jubbada Dhexe region with his thirteen children after losing their cattle, stressed that they had never seen such a drought, adding: “I have witnessed four droughts, but I have never seen one like this.”
The situation in the camps is not optimal either. Some families cook once a day, while there are people who go hungry for three or four days because they have nothing to cook with.
NT / ED
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