SOMALIA DROUGHT MAY HAVE KILLED 43,000 IN 2022, HALF UNDER 5: UN

Tue 21 March 2023:

According to a report released by the government and United Nations agencies, Somalia’s ongoing record drought may have killed up to 43,000 people last year, with children under the age of five accounting for half of them.

In a crisis that experts warn is more severe than the nation’s most recent major drought in 2017 and 2018, the research that was published on Monday represented the first attempt to estimate deaths nationwide.

Led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the study warned that the rate of fatalities could rise in the first half of 2023 as it projected total deaths for this period from 18,100 to 34,200.

“These results present a grim picture of the devastation brought on children and their families by the drought,” UNICEF’s Wafaa Saeed said as he presented the report in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

Mamunur Rahman Malik, a representative of the World Health Organization in Somalia, said the international community faces a race against time to prevent deaths that are avoidable and save lives.

“We have seen deaths and diseases thrive when hunger and food crises prolong,” he said in a statement. “We will see more people dying from the disease than from hunger and malnutrition combined if we do not act now. The cost of our inaction will mean that children, women and other vulnerable people will pay with their lives while we hopelessly, helplessly witness the tragedy unfold.”

According to the UN, five million people in Somalia are suffering from severe food shortages and nearly two million children are at risk of malnutrition as a result of five consecutively unsuccessful rainy seasons.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which establishes the international benchmark for assessing the severity of a food crisis, stated in December that the famine some experts were anticipating had been temporarily avoided but that things were still getting worse.