In Somalia, parents and elder siblings are going hungry to allow young children to feed as nation verges on famine

An internally displaced Somali woman holds her malnourished child fitted with a nasogastric tube inside a ward dedicated for diarrhoea patients at the Banadir hospital in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu, March 5, 2017. REUTERS/Feisal Omar

KISMAYU—In Somalia, mothers are feeding younger children and forgoing slightly older siblings to save the young ones at a time when the country verges on famine.

With food and water becoming increasingly scare, Mohamed Dubow, 58, and his family of four children, all under the age of 14, trekked for more than 50 miles on the speculation that there’s availability of their needs in Kismayu.

With sunken eyes and cheeks, Mohamed says he feels weak following days of hunger because the food he had was not enough for his young children and their mother, Muhubo Hassan.

”I had to sacrifice for the children to feed and when the situation becomes dire, the elder siblings will remain hungry to allow their younger siblings to have what’s available at that particular time,” Mohamed said at a refugee centre ten-minute drive from the Kismayu airstrip in Southern Somalia.

All along the journey, Muhsin, 6, kept on crying and his mother had not had a sleep for two nights.

”He has a fever and diarrhoea,” Muhubo says.

Mohamed Gedi, a health worker at the Kismayu Stabilization Centre says since November last year the facility has seen increase in the number of patients.

”This patients are coming form the rural areas, the pastoral areas,” Gedi said at the cramped facility in Kismayu, the headquarters of the Jubbaland administration.

”The farmers have had their crops fail twice,” he observed.

In the Northern part of the country at the border between the semi-autonomous region of Puntland and the self-declared state of Somaliland, families are forced to walk for more than 100 miles to seek food, water and medicine at the wake of cholera outbreak.

Somalia is one of three countries at risk of famine.  Three consecutive years of drought have left two regions of Somalia—Bay and Bakool—on the brink of emergency.

Humanitarian workers and NGOs have issued repeated warnings. Save the Children chief executive, Kevin Watkins, said on a visit to Puntland this week that the scale of the suffering is even greater than at the equivalent stage in 2011, with deaths from cholera and acute diarrhoea rising sharply.

“Given the weight of evidence, the scale of suffering and the memory of  2011 the international community’s response to the crisis facing Somalia’s children is indefensible and unforgivable,” said Watkins, who called on aid donors to act urgently.