Amid ongoing conflict, a historic drought, and rising food prices, people in Somalia and Somaliland—primarily children under five—are experiencing a confluence of crises: malnutrition and measles.
Hawo experienced these crises firsthand when her 18-month-old daughter Samira ran a high fever and began losing weight rapidly. Hawo and her husband raised livestock for a living, but when drought wiped out their animals, they were forced to move their family to a camp for internally displaced people.
Hawo heard that medical services were available at one of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s nearby mobile health clinics in Baidoa, Somalia. At the clinic, MSF staff determined that Samira was malnourished and gave her the care she needed right away. However,hundreds of thousands of other families like Hawo’s in Somalia and Somaliland still lack access to care; many people describe walking for weeks to find help and losing family members along the way.
Life in overcrowded and underresourced displacement camps in Somalia is difficult, with little-to-no access to basic essentials like food and clean water. This is especially dangerous because of the rising rates of measles, which can both cause and be exacerbated by malnutrition.
This deadly combination has led thousands of desperate families in Somalia to seek care from MSF: between January and July of this year, MSF treated over 9,000 children for malnutrition in Baidoa alone—and our teams continue to receive alarmingly high numbers of malnourished children in our therapeutic feeding programs to this day.
The situation in Somalia and Somaliland is just one example of the uptick MSF staff is seeing in malnutrition cases around the world. According to the United Nations, a record 345 millionpeople across the globe are facing acute food insecurity right now—and MSF teams are stepping up in this moment of crisis.
MSF teams are on the ground in more than 70 countries providing care to people suffering from malnutrition, along with scores of other medical issues. But we can’t do it without you.
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