Somalia's children face death by starvation as famine takes hold

MATT GUTMAN, ANGUS HINES, ROBERT ZEPEDA and MICHELA MOSCUFO

GMA
Tue, September 20, 2022 

At an encampment in Baidoa, Somalia, Garan Hassan tugged at a reporter’s sleeve. Her 18-month-old daughter Malaika was too sick to eat, too weak to cry.

Staff at a Save the Children pediatric nutrition center quickly determined that this toddler had severe acute malnutrition, like more than 500,000 other children in Somalia, according to the U.N. This diagnosis means they could die without immediate treatment.

MORE: Millions could die without 'urgent' funding as 'catastrophic famine' looms in East Africa, IRC says

Malaika’s arm was as thick as a man’s thumb, and she weighed little more than an infant. Her body was shutting down and if left untreated she would likely die.

Somalia, like Ethiopia and Kenya, is suffering a record drought which, coupled with soaring food prices and plummeting donor funding to humanitarian groups, has left more than 22 million people starving, according to the U.N.’s World Food Programme.

A 2011 famine in Somalia killed nearly 260,000 people, half of them children.

PHOTO: Drone footage of the aid encampment in Baidoa, Somalia. (ABC News)

More than half of the country’s children face acute malnutrition, Save the Children revealed in a report released on Monday.

The hunger has dislocated over a million Somalis, like Garan Hassan and her family, many of them seeking food and support in the once-small town of Baidoa. It is now a massive sprawl of thousands of tattered tents and home to 600,000 internally displaced people.

Many of them, like Hassan, had to travel through territory controlled by the Islamic fundamentalist group al-Shabab to get there.

Hassan told ABC News her husband died from starvation “at the beginning of the famine.” He was just 32. She is now the sole provider for little Malaika and her six siblings, which is why she told Save the Children staff she could not take Malaika to the hospital — she had to ensure that her other children were cared for.

MORE: Nutrition center providing help as famine looms in Somalia

“For me the declaration of famine is irrelevant. Look around you,” Ebrima Saidy, Chief Impact Officer at Save the Children, told ABC News at the nutrition center where over 200 women with acutely malnourished children hoped to get support, “what is this if this is not famine?”

A famine has not been officially declared in Somalia since 2011.

Aid groups say that after the 2011 famine they had built up the infrastructure to help, but now with donor attention on the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, they lacked the funds.

PHOTO: Ebrima Saidy, Chief Impact Officer at Save the Children, speaks with ABC News reporter Matt Gutman. (ABC News)

Famine prevention efforts by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization go to a million Somalis, but the agency tells ABC News its projects here are only 24% funded.

The next day Save the Children staff visited Garan Hassan and Malaika. They found that another of her siblings had severe acute malnutrition and both children, Malaika and her 3-year-old brother Nadifa, had multiple complications. They had suffered fevers, but were now disturbingly cold to the touch.

MORE: Millions of lives at risk as famine stalks Horn of Africa

The staff warned Hassan they could die if they didn’t get treatment. After a terrifying night, Hassan quickly agreed to go to the hospital.

The children were whisked through the camp to a van that took them along streets broken by neglect and war to the Save the Children stabilization center– basically a hospital for the acutely malnourished.

Hospital staff determined the children suffered from malaria, whooping cough and measles – a result of their immune systems cratering from malnutrition.

PHOTO: Garan Hassan smiles as her child Nadifa finally drinks at the hospital. (ABC News)

During the admission process, as the two children were weighed, and measured and prodded with needles, Nadifa whimpered that he was thirsty. A few minutes later he was propped up on a nurse’s knee and given nutritional formula.

Nadifa drank one cup, then two. A milk mustache formed on his face, and on his mother’s face, for the first time in a long time, a smile.

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Somalia's children face death by starvation as famine takes hold originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Too weak to cry: famine looms over Somalia's children


Mustafa HAJI ABDINUR
Mon, September 19, 2022 


As flies buzz over his tiny body, two-year-old Sadak Ibrahim barely whimpers, too weak to cry or shoo them away -- a heartbreaking glimpse of the hunger crisis gripping Somalia.

The Horn of Africa nation is on the brink of a second famine in just over a decade, enduring its worst drought in 40 years after failed rainy seasons since late 2020 wiped out crops and livestock.

With a fifth monsoon forecast to fail, the United Nations warned this month that time was running out to save lives as it urged donors to contribute more to the relief effort.

UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said the situation was worse than the 2011 famine when 260,000 people died in the country, more than half of them children under the age of six.

Aid is slowly making its way to Somalia following delays caused by the war in Ukraine, which also sent the cost of transport and emergency supplies soaring.


But many fear the help will arrive too late for the country's youngest victims like Sadak, with around 730 children already reported dead in nutrition centres between January and July this year, according to UNICEF.

At De Martino Hospital in the capital Mogadishu, Sadak's anxious mother Fadumo Daud sat vigil by the toddler's bedside, a feeding tube dangling from his face, as she prayed for a miracle.

"He is the only child I have, and he is very sick as you can see," the young woman told AFP, recounting the three-day journey that brought her to Mogadishu from Baidoa -- one of the epicentres of the crisis.
- 'Dramatic increase' -

In recent years, climate disasters have increasingly become the main driver of migration in Somalia, which is also grappling with a brutal 15-year Islamist insurgency.

Every day, dozens of people stream into camps set up for displaced families in Mogadishu.


The International Rescue Committee (IRC) non-profit runs seven health and nutrition centres in and around the capital, but their resources are sharply stretched with the crisis showing no signs of abating.

"The number of new arrivals has increased dramatically starting from June this year," IRC nutrition officer Faisa Ali told AFP.

Most of the children turn up malnourished, she said, with their numbers trebling from a maximum of 13 a day in May to 40 now.

A mother of 10, Nuunay Adan Durow fled her home and travelled 300 kilometres (200 miles) to find medical help for her three-year-old son Hassan Mohamed, his limbs swollen due to severe malnutrition.

"For the last three years, we have not harvested anything due to lack of rain," Durow told AFP, describing how she was forced to trek for two hours daily to find water for her family.

"We faced a terrible situation," the 35-year-old said, cradling Hassan in her arms as they awaited medical attention at an IRC centre on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
- 'The worst cases' -

The drought has also affected parts of Kenya and Ethiopia but the risks for Somalia are particularly grave, with 200,000 people in danger of starvation and around 1.5 million children facing acute malnutrition by next month, the UN says.


The crisis has not spared even traditionally fertile regions such as Lower Shabelle, where drought-stricken communities would seek refuge in the past, hoping to find sustenance there.

"We used to farm and get vegetables to feed our children before the drought affected us," Fadumo Ibrahim Hassan, 35, told AFP.

Now "we live on whatever God gives us", the widowed mother-of-six said.

A recent arrival in Mogadishu, her two-year-old daughter Yusro's condition had deteriorated to the point that the IRC staff could no longer care for her.

Weighing just 5.8 kilogrammes (12.8 pounds) -- half that of a healthy girl the same age -- Yusro was dangerously malnourished, according to the IRC medical team, who told AFP she urgently needed to be admitted to a hospital.

At De Martino Hospital, doctor Fahmo Ali told AFP that each day brought more sick, malnourished children into her care.

"The ones we are receiving here are the worst cases with complications," she said.

"Sometimes those we have treated come back.