Health and Nutrition

We advance and render Health and Nutrition Support for the Most Vulnerable Women and Children in Somalia. Somalia has been ravaged by more than two decades of armed conflict causing immense damage to the country’s infrastructure and mass displacement and suffering among its people this is in addition to persistent drought and famine, perennial flooding and widespread insecurity experienced during this period. According to Somalia Nutrition Cluster, Acute food insecurity and malnutrition have dramatically worsened in Somalia since the beginning of 2022.The prolonged drought affecting about 80% of the country, increasing food prices, and severely underfunded humanitarian assistance is putting some areas across Somalia at risk of famine. According to the Somalia Updated IPC and Famine Risk Analysis published in April 2022, the situation is expected to worsen in the coming months – posing an immediate risk to the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable, including women and children, especially among internally displaced people: Over 6 million people (more than 38% of the total population) are expected to be in urgent need of food, safe drinking water, and other lifesaving humanitarian assistance to avert the risk of famine. Over 1.2 million acutely malnourished children, and pregnant and breastfeeding women will not receive adequate lifesaving nutrition assistance including 300,000 children with moderate acute malnutrition who are at risk of death due to the current low coverage of the Targeted Supplementary Feeding Programme (TSFP) and other nutrition preventative programmes. Worsening food security, declining access to clean water, outbreaks of acute diarrhoea, and a measles epidemic are contributing factors to acute malnutrition – there is already evidence of a 51% and 15% increase in admissions to treatment for severely and moderately acute malnourished children, respectively, across the country since the beginning of 2022.

In this scenario and with less than half of children, pregnant, and breastfeeding women currently receiving lifesaving services across the country, it is urgent to rapidly scale
up humanitarian services to save lives and build resilience.

In response to this dire nutritional situation, SIADO is among the many humanitarian actors that is seeking to provide basic services, including health services for women and children including supporting Mother and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN) programmes and TB centers, provision of nutritional supplements to malnourished children in IDPs camps, support immunization programmes for children under the age of 5 years among other projects to those who need them.