UN calls for urgent funding to provide humanitarian aid to Somalis

Saturday, July 20, 2013

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The UN humanitarian agency has called for urgent funding to enable it respond to immense humanitarian needs in Somalia and to consolidate gains made since 2011.

In its latest Humanitarian Bulletin for June, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says its partners are implementing a three-year humanitarian strategy to help Somalis be more resilient to shocks such as droughts, floods and cyclical food insecurity.

“The shortfall in funding also impacts efforts to find lasting solutions for Somalia’s 1.1 million internally displaced people,” OCHA said in its latest report released in Nairobi on Wednesday.

“Based on implementation capacities of humanitarian agencies, the funding requirement for the remainder of 2013 has been revised to 1.15 billion U.S. dollars, a decrease of 200 million dollars from the original appeal of 1.3 billion dollars.”

The statement comes after OCHA’s Director of Operations John Ging called for increased investments in Somalia to help break a circle of crisis in the Horn of Africa nation.

Ging who visited Somalia and Kenya last weekend said the needs are still huge despite gradual improvements in the humanitarian situation in Somalia.

“I call on the international community to invest now to build the resilience of Somalis and stop the cycle of crisis they have endured for far too long,” Ging said in a statement on July 13 at the end of a two-day visit to Kenya and Somalia.

The Horn of Africa nation’s 2013-2015 Consolidated Appeal prioritize resilience strengthening as a key objective.

However, OCHA says with only about a third of financial requirements covered at mid-year, humanitarian actors have had to prioritize response to life saving activities, making little investment in basic services, safety nets and resilience programmes.

“Only timely, adequate and sustained funding will humanitarians be able to effectively build on the gains made since late 2011 through investment in resilience to mitigate and avoid crises and support the transition from aid dependency to sustainability,” says OCHA.

According to the UN humanitarian agency, about 1 million people in Somalia urgently require humanitarian assistance and a further 1.7 million need sustained support to avoid falling back into crisis.

“People who fled the fighting were reported to have started returning home by early July. Humanitarian access remains challenging and logistics have emerged as a major bottleneck,” says the report.

Somalia has been torn asunder by factional fighting since 1991 but has recently made progress towards stability.

The insurgents retreated from Mogadishu in 2011 and last year new Government institutions emerged, as the country ended a transitional phase toward setting up a permanent, democratically- elected government.

Meanwhile, OCHA says despite the increased violence, some 4 million people received polio vaccination after a polio outbreak was confirmed in May, six years after Somalia was declared free of the crippling virus.

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