GENEVA, 28th February, 2023 (WAM) — Lifesaving aid is needed urgently to help millions of people enduring one of the longest and most severe droughts on record in the Horn of Africa, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Tuesday, as the region enters its sixth consecutive rainy season with no rain.
Today in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, more than eight million people require food assistance and around 332,000 “urgently need food, otherwise their lives are at risk”, said UNHCR spokesperson Olga Sarrado.
A full eight in 10 of the displaced are women and children, the UNHCR official continued, while UN migration agency, IOM, warned that failed rains and conflict in Somalia, “could force tens of thousands of people" to seek refuge in major cities and towns, particularly in Baidoa and Mogadishu where IOM projects that approximately 300,000 people could be newly displaced by July 2023”.
In an appeal for $137 million to maintain vital humanitarian programmes this year, UNHCR’s Sarrado said that well over three million refugees and internally displaced people have already been forced to leave their homes in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
Survival is a struggle for these uprooted communities, amid scarce water sources, hunger, insecurity and conflict. They need safety and assistance, just as much as host communities do too, the UN agency insisted.
“While famine has so far been averted in Somalia, mostly due to a stepped-up humanitarian response, people continue to battle life-threatening food and water shortages resulting from massive losses of harvests, livestock, and income,” Sarrado explained.