Famine Officially Declared in Three More Regions of Somalia

Shangara Hassan, who is 20 years old and has four children, holds her sick daughter, while another child sleeps in a makeshift shelter she built for them in a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Shangara arrived in Dadaab two weeks ago having walked with her four children from Salag, Somalia. (2011 Kate Holt/CARE)

ATLANTA (August 3, 2011) - Today, famine was officially declared in three additional regions of south-central Somalia, adding even more urgency to CARE's call for a rapid and ramped-up response from the international community.

Across Somalia, more than 3.7 million people – more than half the entire population – are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. In some areas in the south nearly half the population is malnourished, making it the highest malnutrition rate in the world.

"What worries me is that the current dry season extends to September, so what we are seeing now is not the worst of it" Wouter Schaap, assistant country director from CARE International Somalia, testified Wednesday during a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the Horn of Africa drought. "What is needed is food and/or cash assistance that allows people to buy food or water, nutritional support to malnourished children, water, sanitation and health services."

Schaap sounded the alarm for governments and donors around the world to help boost the response to a food crisis that has gripped not only Somalia but also Kenya and Ethiopia. "The U.N. says $2.5 billion is needed for the humanitarian response, $1.4 billion more than what has been committed so far."

CARE began to scale up its emergency response to the drought in the Horn of Africa at the first signs of this current crisis in early 2011. Today, CARE is helping more than 1 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya with lifesaving food, water, nutrition and other lifesaving emergency assistance. CARE, for instance, is the lead agency providing food, water and primary education the Dadaab refugee camps, the world's largest. CARE is working around the clock to scale up assistance to the more than 390,000 refugees there, most of them Somalis.

Schaap told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that, during the 1992 famine in Somalia, a large proportion of deaths were due to preventable diseases within a severely weakened population. "With the rainy season approaching in October and the huge numbers of IDPs [internally displaced people] in Somalia," he said, "this is a major concern for humanitarian workers."