As the sun beats down on the dusty yellow earth and cluster of tin shacks near the city of Galkayo in central Somalia, mothers point at their children, who look on shyly, and nearly all repeat the same thing: “I don’t know what to feed my children” or “I’m not cooking today because there’s no food.”
They are feeling despair across the country as the rains, first no, then heavy, began to fall. In late 2022, five consecutive rains, which usually fall twice a year, failed to fall, causing Somalia’s worst drought in four decades and pushing the country to the brink of famine. The disaster was averted only by a $2.4 billion emergency response led by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and international charities such as Save the Children. Then last year, the country suffered its worst floods in a century, washing away fields, sending food prices soaring and forcing more than a million people from their homes.
“For those who don’t believe in climate change, this is clear evidence that it is happening,” said El Khidir Daloom, WFP’s Somali representative. “The Somali people did not cause the climate crisis, but they are suffering its effects.”
The tiny hamlet of Samawadeh is a microcosm of Somalia, a fragile state that has been embroiled in war since 1991 and is now at risk of frequent extreme weather events. Nearly all of the 167 families who live here have fled conflict, drought and floods, some multiple times, and technically are refugees from neighbouring countries such as Ethiopia and Yemen.
The precarious life they now lead highlights not only how difficult it can be to rebuild a failed state, but also how even the best-intentioned international efforts can leave people in dire limbo, unable to return home or move on. And as the numbers of displaced and desperate Somali people grow, their growing humanitarian needs collide with growing aid fatigue.
About 4 million Somalis, or about a fifth of the population, face “crisis” or “emergency” food insecurity, the jargon UN experts use to describe finer stages of human suffering. Put simply, these are just two rungs below starvation, the top rung on a ladder of unimaginable misery. Among those climbing this ladder of death are 1.7 million children under the age of five who are acutely malnourished. “My biggest worry is what to feed my children,” says Muslimo, a mother of nine. “We need help.”
But her pleas are going unheeded: less than $200 million has been raised of the $1.6 billion needed for humanitarian aid in Somalia this year. Mohammed Abdiradif, Save the Children’s acting Somali director, says that forces aid agencies and charities to make difficult choices about who to help. “When they see children who are severely malnourished, there’s very little they can do,” Abdiradif says. “When you can’t help them, it really raises a lot of questions.”
Extreme weather and conflict are the direct causes of the current crises. But these crises would not be so deadly if Somalia’s people had not been impoverished by decades of fighting and the rapacious rule of warlords, jihadists, and corrupt officials. Nearly all statistics for the country, including population estimates, should be taken as estimates; the last census was conducted in 1986 but was never made public. Still, Somalia remains one of the poorest countries on earth; its GDP per capita is probably less than $800.
The economy is fueled by two things. First, Somali expatriates send home about $2 billion each year, a significant amount in a country with a GDP of just $10 billion. Second, foreign aid, which reached about $3.6 billion last year, making it Somalia’s largest industry after agriculture. And aid is both an attractive source of patronage and a target for corruption in a country that ranks as the most corrupt of 180 countries in an index compiled annually by watchdog group Transparency International.
Somalia’s reliance on humanitarian aid may also explain why roughly one in five people are trapped in abandoned camps like Samawadeh. Around four million people are classified as “internally displaced” across the country, up from about one million a decade ago. Many would be much better off returning to their old homes and livelihoods, or finding work and new homes in the city, than staying where they are. “I love farming,” says grandmother Halima. “I can sleep when I want, work when I want.” But returning home isn’t always an option: Her farm was washed away by floods.
Dhaka has been living in another camp, Kourmiye Garsour, for five years now, but she misses her old life tending her wandering herds in search of pasture. “I want to go back because it makes me someone who has something,” she says, recalling the time when she had 40 goats and two donkeys. The rains have brought back grass, but she has no money to buy back the animals that died in the drought.
Instead, it is the displaced who are effectively cornered, crammed into camps, often on private property, where they have no security of tenure and rely on charity. They now need urgent assistance to feed their children and themselves. But for Somalia to break the cycle of crisis, its rulers need to start seeing them as citizens, not as displaced people, and invest in turning the makeshift camps into permanent settlements with schools, clinics, decent housing, and jobs.
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