MOGADISHU: An aid group is warning that more than 20,000 children in drought-hit Somalia could starve to death in the coming months without continued international assistance.
Save the Children said on Thursday that the number of cases of severe acute malnutrition has “skyrocketed” in several of the nine Somali districts assessed.
The new survey warns of “famine-like conditions” in parts of the Horn of Africa nation.
The aid group says that without $1.5 billion in assistance, Somalia could face a hunger crisis as severe as the one in 2011, when famine killed more than a quarter-million people. Half of the victims were children.
Thousands have been killed in the latest drought as Somalis struggle with poor rains and a cholera outbreak, with many people trapped in areas controlled by extremist group Al-Shabab.
Lack of access to hungry parts of Somalia controlled by militants is threatening the lives of tens of thousands of malnourished children, a charity said on Thursday, as the war-torn nation risks falling back into famine.
Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), often fatal without medical care, has “skyrocketed” to more than three times the emergency threshold of two per cent in Hiraan region’s Mataban District, a survey by Save the Children found.
“Scaling up to provide services to everyone affected is a challenge because we have around two million people living in Al Shabaab controlled areas,” said Hassan Noor Saadi, Save the Children’s Somalia country director.
“Getting aid to them is not easy.” Al Shabaab militants ruled most of south-central Somalia until 2011, when they were driven out of the capital Mogadishu by African Union troops, and still carry out major attacks.
In 2011, some 260,000 Somalis died of famine caused by drought, conflict and lack of access to humanitarian aid.
Somali’s erratic spring rains were not good enough to guarantee crop growth, while livestock continue to die, leaving families with little to feed their children, Saadi said.
“When animals die, there is no food, no milk, and no assets to make money off and subsequently buy food,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.
More than 275,000 children potentially face suffer life-threatening severe acute malnutrition this year, according to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.
The golftoday.