While more than 2,000 Somalis cross the borders into Kenya and Ethiopia every day in search of assistance, in Somalia itself the movement of people desperately seeking food and medical help is also taking on unprecedented numbers. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Somalia are dealing with fast-rising numbers of displaced families that travel great distances to reach MSF’s hospitals and therapeutic feeding centres.

Luul Sankus, a mother of two, walked with her husband and children for more than 160 kilometres to reach the village of Hurufle in the Juba Valley.

Somalia © MSF
Dinsor, Somalia. Here and throughout Somalia people's lives are being threatened by drought, ongoing conflict and high food prices.

“I haven’t seen our home region for over nine months now. We are farmers and when the rains failed nothing was left for us. My husband and two of our kids walked all the way to Hurufle, where we now live as displaced people. When we came to Hurufle, our son fell ill. There was no treatment, no shelter and no food. I was advised that I should take him to the MSF hospital in Marere. That’s why I am here.”

What characterizes this crisis is that people are now leaving the villages and rural areas en masse because crops have failed and livestock are dying.

“Displacement is nothing new to Somalis,” says MSF operations manager, Joe Belliveau. “For the past few years hundreds of thousands have fled the violence in Mogadishu and elsewhere. What is new is that people are now fleeing the rural areas simply because they have no more food to eat.”

Camps for the displaced are popping up inside Somalia wherever people feel they have a better chance of getting help. In the village of Jilib in Lower Juba Valley, for example, around 5,000 people have spontaneously settled in a camp in the hope of receiving support from the community, the authorities or MSF.

MSF is currently running nine medical nutritional programs in south-central Somalia. These programs, most of them in territories controlled by rebel group Al-Shabaab, together with MSF’s three large programs in the refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, conduct thousands of medical consultations daily and currently treat more than 10,000 severely malnourished children.

“In several parts of Somalia, this is the worst situation we’ve seen in the past decade,” says Belliveau. “Normal coping mechanisms are exhausted and many people have reached their limits. MSF is prepared to do more but to do so we need certain restrictions to be lifted. If MSF is allowed to send in international technical experts to work alongside our more than 1,000 Somali staff and we are permitted to send in supply flights with therapeutic feeding and other medicines, then we can scale up.”

MSF has worked continuously in Somalia since 1991 and currently provides free medical care in eight regions of southern Somalia. More than 1,400 Somali staff, supported by approximately 100 staff in Nairobi, provide free primary healthcare, malnutrition treatment and medical support to displaced people, as well as surgery, water and relief supply distributions. MSF does not accept any government funding for its projects in Somalia. All funding for the country comes from private donors.

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