Somalia has experienced years of conflict and fragility resulting in chronic poverty and vulnerability, displacement, poor economic capacity and food and nutrition insecurity. In 2020, up to 1.3 million people across Somalia were expected to face food consumption gaps or depletion of assets as the result of climatic shocks that have been recurrent since 2016, including six seasons of drought conditions and two seasons of severe flooding. In addition, almost 850 000 children under the age of five were acutely malnourished, including over 143 00 likely to be severely malnourished. 

To respond to this looming crisis, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, promoted activities aimed at:

• enhancing food security and resilience, through integrated cash and livelihood assistance for crop, livestock and fisheries; and

• tackling underlying causes of malnutrition, through nutrition awareness raising, food hygiene, conservation and storage.

This promising practice documents a distance learning initiative through radio launched in 2020 by FAO as a response to threats posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting cash+ activities and replacing face-to-face beneficiary trainings. Through this initiative, FAO sought to continue enhancing rural communities’ capacities to mitigate shocks, especially those compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, and disseminate context-specific behaviour change messages on nutrition and healthy diets. In 2021, the scope of the training was expanded to include long-term agriculture development programmes and social protection activities through village savings and loans associations.