Somalia's worst drought in a decade is pushing growing numbers of children into near-famine conditions and deepening the humanitarian crisis caused by political violence, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
Some 3.2 million Somalis are among an estimated 19 million people in the Horn of Africa in urgent need of life-saving food assistance, top UN aid officials said.
The Somali region is located in the eastern part of Ethiopia. Its capital, Jijiga, is located 635 km from the capital Addis Ababa. Currently there are three refugee camps in this region, namely Kebribeyah, Awberie and Sheder, which together host about 28,500 individuals. To allow refugees to complement the basic food ration, UNHCR and its partners started a number of homegardening projects.
MORE than 14 million people in the East Africa region require urgent food aid owing to drought and spiralling cereal and fuel prices, aid agencies say.
In an emergency appeal on Thursday, Oxfam warns that millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya are fast being pushed "towards severe hunger and destitution'. Earlier this week the U.N. said it needed
Mogadishu residents protested for a second day on Tuesday against food traders who are rejecting old currency notes, fuelling tension as residents go hungrier, witnesses said. Hundreds of youths barricaded roads, stoned vehicles and burned tyres in parts of the bombed-out Somali capital demanding that traders accept the worn-out Somali notes from residents desperately in need of food and other essentials.
The government of Somalia has appealed for an "urgent international help' for people in drought-affected regions of the country saying that the "transitional federal government cannot address the
Authorities in Somalia's self-declared autonomous region of Puntland in the northeast have appealed for international aid following the destruction of thousands of hectares of pasture and farmland by a locust infestation.
"We issued an appeal for help on September 23; Puntland alone cannot deal with this,' Hassan Arab, the deputy minister of rangeland and forestry, told the un's Integrated Regional Information Networks. "This time the swarms are bigger and more destructive than the ones we had in June. They have also spread to a wider area,' he said.
