Dollow, Somalia

Joint UN resilience programme kicks in

Three United Nations emergency directors have called for more sustained funding for Somalia nearly three year after the worst famine hit the Horn of Africa nation.

The emergency heads include Dominique Burgeon of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), David Kaatrud of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) and Ted Chaiban of the UN’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), whose last leg of their Somali tour took them to Dollow in southern Somalia and the Horn of Africa.  FAO, WFP and UNICEF share the same goal of strengthening resilience in Somalia and reaffirmed their commitment to play a key role for mobilizing change through resilience enhancement while prioritizing the most vulnerable in the region.

The three are part of a larger team of emergency directors from the various UN agencies and international NGOs, led by the UN office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affair (OCHA), with an objective of reviewing the humanitarian situation in Somalia and Yemen.

In Dollow, the directors visited a number of projects under the joint resilience strategy involving FAO of the UN, WFP and UNICEF. However, this year, the UN is confronted with one of the lowest funded Consolidated Appeal Processes (CAP) in years, standing at 24 percent as of June 2014. While visiting one of the UNICEF supported health centers, Chaiban warned that funding shortages is putting millions of lives at risk.

“A big part of resilience building is the establishment of community based basic services,” said Chaiban who visited a UNICEF supported health and feeding center in Dollow.

“Almost immediately, UNICEF needs USD 8 million to support 30 NGOs like this one to provide services across Somalia as a whole and if we stop this funding 3 million Somali children and women may no longer have proper access to basic health services,” he added.

Approximately 857,000 Somalis require urgent and life-saving assistance and more than 2 million are facing food insecurity as a result of drought, deficient harvests and ongoing conflict in the country.

Preventing a repeat of famine

In July 2011, the UN declared famine in two regions based on analysis by FAO’s Food and Nutrition Analysis Unit and FEWS NET. Later that year, the declaration was extended to other regions. After a substantial increase in emergency assistance, a sharp decline in local cereal prices, and an excellent long rainy season, food security improved.

The UN declared the famine’s end in February 2012. Currently in the offing, a sweet potato initiative introduced initially for fodder but now well adopted by the communities for both fodder and sweet potatoes for human consumption. However, as FAO braces for a broader rollout of the Sweet Potato Initiative, Burgeon warned that funding shortfalls threaten this potential success story.

“This creative initiative goes to show that working together, we can make a big difference. Where FAO supports the farmers with potato veins and simple technology, WFP will use the produce in its school feeding programmes and UNICEF will promote the consumption of the Vitamin A rich potatoes to reduce deficiencies in children and pregnant and lactating women. Unfortunately for us to sustain this we need sustained funding”, said Burgeon.

FAO’s programme interventions in southern Somalia are geared towards protecting people’s livelihood assets, recovery from crisis and enhancing resilience to shocks. The interventions ensure access to agriculture, livestock and fisheries inputs, prevention and control of livestock diseases and support to alternative livelihood strategies.

WFP’s interventions are targeting about 165,000 beneficiaries per month, covering parts of areas of Gedo, Lower Juba, Bay and Bakool regions. The agency’s innovative activities are geared towards increasing a voucher-based resilience safety net.

WFP’s Emergency Director, Kaatrud said: “This is essentially a pilot, an initial effort, which needs to be taken at scale in a country like Somalia to break cycles of vulnerability and dependence.”

Somalia has seen off and on war since the collapse of the state in 1991. Since then, diseases, recurrent droughts and floods have made life difficult for many Somalis, reducing their ability to cope.