World Accused Of Repeating Mistakes Over Somalia Famine Threat

The international community’s response to the threat of famine in Somalia is repeating some of the mistakes of the last such crisis six years ago, the aid agency Save the Children has warned.

Kevin Watkins, chief executive of Save the Children UK, said on Thursday after visiting Somalia’s Puntland region for three days that the response needed to be better co-ordinated and funded more rapidly to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“I just haven’t seen the level of detailed planning that I would expect to see in a crisis of this order of magnitude especially in light of what happened six years ago,” he told the Financial Times.

“There have been pledges of $450m but no one has any idea where this money is coming from, where it’s going to be delivered, when it’s going to be delivered and how.”

In 2011-12, 260,00 people died in Somalia after the international community ignored more than a dozen famine warnings. As of Thursday evening, the UN said its Somalia appeal had received only $100.6m of the $865.3m requested three weeks ago.

Mr Watkins said the death toll was already in the hundreds, with many of the fatalities being young children who had suffered from acute watery diarrhoea or cholera.

The UN has warned that 6.2m people are at risk of famine in Somalia, with several million more facing the same fate in South Sudan, Yemen and parts of north-eastern Nigeria.

Last month it declared a famine in parts of South Sudan after the country’s three-year-old civil war prevented aid agencies reaching those in need.

Financial Times