Reports and presenters:

LL Lucy Lamble

BQ Ben Quinn

SF Simona Foltyn

Interviewees and speakers:



AMF Ali Mohamed Farah

ZC Zamzan Chamasaid

SAS Saad Ali Shire



LL This is the Global development podcast and I’m Lucy Lamble. More than 20 million people in four countries are at risk of starvation according to the UN, making this the biggest crisis facing the world since 1945. So far, only parts of South Sudan have been formally classified as in famine but the UN has clearly signalled that many other parts of east Africa are on the brink. Humanitarian agencies say that they need $4.4bn by July just to assist those already in need. Why are we here again and what can and should be done? Joining me today are reporters Ben Quinn, fresh back from Somalia, and Simona Foltyn, who’s been to one of the worst-affected areas in South Sudan. First to Hargeisa and Burao in Somaliland.



BQ Well, I spent a week in Somaliland, the self-declared republic, which is in northern Somalia, and we travelled from Hargeisa, the capital, over to Burao, the second largest city. It was a parched, bleak landscape where you once had green pastures and instead it was littered with the carcasses of animals and livestock of various types who had died. They’re the animals on which people in the nomadic pastures in that region rely for their livelihoods and as a result they’ve been forced into impromptu camps which you see scattered around the landscape as you drive through it.

BQ “When did she arrive?”

Male speaker “Five days.”

BQ “And is he improving?”

BQ So one of the places I visited was a nutrition stabilisation clinic for acutely and severely malnourished children in the city of Burao, Somaliland’s second largest city, and what I saw there was a small ward with about 20 beds, with the same number of mothers and children, some people as well lying on the ground on mattresses because of the lack of space. So, among the people I spoke to were two mothers at that clinic. One had a severely malnourished son, one year and eight months old, so she brought him to the clinic in Burao for help and here she is speaking about their plight.

Female speaker When the goats were alive we gave him milk, then when that ran out we gave him tea. Since we arrived at the hospital here, we have fed him milk again. Sometimes we gave him dried rice but there’s no more food for the adults. We will stay in this area – we have nowhere else to go.

BQ The other mother I spoke to, she was in the same stabilisation ward a few beds away. She had a two-year-old son who’d been vomiting and had diarrhoea as well, a typical example of some of the families there.

FS My son is two years old. Just like the other cases, our livestock was wiped out. There’s no water and the situation is desperate. He’s been sick for the last 18 months since the drought. I am from here. There was no assistance there so we came here. I was feeling very desperate. There are so many people. I have 10 children and he is the youngest.

LL We heard there the sounds of children clearly in need. What actually happens at a feeding clinic, Ben? How are mothers and children being helped?

BQ They receive therapeutic products such as F-75, which is a therapeutic milk product and at a later date they might also be treated with other products. And one of the initial things before that though is treatment for complications which arise from malnutrition and that might be diarrhoea, vomiting and various other types of health conditions which are really quite acute at the moment in various parts of Somalia which are suffering from the crisis. I also spoke to Ali Mohamed Farah, the governor of the region of Saraar in Somaliland, which is one of the most badly affected areas of this looming famine, and he told me that he had been receiving calls from people who were in a really bad way. They had actually been unable to make their way into the cities or towns for any sort of rudimentary aid or relief, people were lying around too weak to move, he’d been told by telephone. We were unable to reach those areas as well, as was he. So here he is speaking about the general situation in that region. You can really tell how bad things were getting.

AMF The displacements, there are displacements, which is in the region, it’s costing challenges, lack of food, it’s basically lack of food, the lack of proper shelter, the lack of water. So potentially it can lead to outbreaks, in theory, there’ll be outbreaks of diseases because of people living with poor sanitation and the camps increasing in number.

LL When so many people are displaced as they are from the drought in this situation, there are always concerns about outbreaks of measles and cholera. Is there any evidence of that happening?

BQ Well, yes there is actually, and Gavi, the vaccine alliance, is distributing 956 doses which is going to be reaching I think quite a lot of people in various parts of Somalia. There have been reports of outbreaks of measles and indeed nurses and health workers we spoke to on the ground anecdotally told us about that as well. One of the problems is that people have resorted to taking supplies from tainted or dirty water and of course that’s a big issue when it comes to cholera.

LL Simona, you’ve been a regular visitor to South Sudan since its creation in 2011. On this last trip you actually managed to get up to Unity State, not an easy part of the country to access. What did you see there?

SF These people who essentially have come to these food distribution sites to get some food and it’s been delivered by UN agencies, they are the strongest ones, they are those who have been able to walk, sometimes for days, to get out of the swamps where they’ve been hiding. So it’s difficult to see a difference between a year-and-a-half ago when already things were really bad and already people were severely food insecure, and now when famine has actually been declared the people who are probably most affected by this famine are far away from the reach of aid agencies, they’re probably on some of these islands in the swamps where they’ve been hiding for months or even years.

LL Simona, how are the government in South Sudan reacting?

SF The government has said that it would pledge 1% of the humanitarian appeal from the international community, which is in total $1.6bn so of course 1% of that is quite a nominal amount, but of course we have to remember that in the end the government is one of the actors in this armed conflict and it’s very much responsible at least in part for what we are seeing in Unity. It is basically a direct result of lack of access by humanitarian actors and the party that is especially being blamed for that is the government.

LL So are aid agencies actually able to get the access they critically need?

SF Well, they are now, they have really ramped up aid operations, they have reached over 300,000 people in southern and central Unity, which is quite a lot, but of course what is really needed is full-time access. They may be able to get in and distribute food aid let’s say for a month, but if they’re not able to come back in a month’s time then the same scenario will be repeated over and over again. The real problem is that the peace deal that was signed in 2015 has pretty much collapsed. There is very little will on the side of the international community to return to the negotiating table and in light of that it’s just very difficult to see how this conflict will end any time soon.

LL If you’re a listener sitting at home weighing up now whether you’re going to donate to any of the current appeals, how significant a risk is it that donations that individuals make end up in the wrong hands?

SF Well it’s a good question, it’s a difficult one. There has always been a degree of aid diversion, both voluntary and involuntary, so what we’ve seen a lot in Unity but also in a lot of other parts of South Sudan is armed actors deliberately targeting civilians who have received aid. Part of this is out of necessity because simply they don’t get anything to eat themselves, but of course a lot of this is also a deliberate effort to starve a population that is perceived as sympathetic to the other side. The problem is that there doesn’t really seem to be an alternative. Nobody has been able to come up with a way to do it safely where you can make sure that aid is not going into the hands of armed actors. And in the end UN agencies and aid agencies are faced with a very difficult choice to deliver aid and risk that it reaches maybe some of the refugees but also armed actors, or not deliver aid at all, in which case people would certainly die of hunger.

LL And Ben, the situation obviously in Somalia and particularly in Somaliland is rather different.

BQ It’s very true, it is different in Somaliland, it’s a relatively stable area. There is the issue of Al-Shabaab which is quite active in southern parts of Somalia and parts of Puntland and I think a report in 2013 by the Overseas [Development] Institute in fact found that Al-Shabaab had been quite successful in squeezing money out of aid organisations that they even set up their own humanitarian office to coordinate that. So aid groups or humanitarians in southern Somalia, where Al-Shabaab are particularly active, are left in a very difficult [position] and unfortunately they’ve got over their shoulder legislation in developed countries which penalise those who work in areas and perhaps would be tempted to pay money to groups such as Al-Shabaab. It drives those types of payments underground, but they have to be made in order to get past roadblock Y or roadblock X. So that’s an issue, it’s quite critical already in Somalia at the moment this time around, it was very critical in 2011 during the last famine. So in the north in Somaliland, where it’s relatively stable, the government there have been saying they’ve seen very little aid coming to it [the area] from developed countries from the ancient donors such as the US or the UK.

LL Back in 2011, the last officially declared famine, more than a quarter of a million people died. Do health workers and officials feel that the situation could be as bad this time around?

BQ One of the people I spoke to was Zamzan Chamasaid, who was a worker at a mobile health clinic supported by Unicef outside the city of Burao, and she just shook her head when we said how bad is this going to be, is it going to be worse than 2011? She was in no doubt that was the case. She basically said we need help now and looking around, she was in a camp where there were more than a thousand people. We went into tents, spoke to people who said that they had run out of their last remaining stocks of food, a day before they were out of water. So next week or the week after is potentially going to be too late for those people if an aid relief effort doesn’t get into gear very soon. I spoke to Saad Ali Shire, the foreign minister, a very quietly spoken man, but he couldn’t hide his frustration and he was quite scathing about the international response.

SAS WFP, the World Food Programme, I think, has finished providing for 6,000 families for three months. And I understand they just started, or are about to start, feeding another 2,000 families, I heard. But will you compare that to the need, which is for about 250,000 to 300,000 families.

BQ Yes, in Somaliland yes.

SAS It’s really a drop in the ocean. I think we survived so far because of the effort.

BQ I put it to the foreign minister that there is obviously a concern about corruption and the response from the foreign minister was that he understood that but what was the choice? And he pledged that they do have a committee which is made up of business people and members of the government who are coordinating the aid effort. He feels that the aid is just not getting through in its current format via NGOs, just fast enough, and he feels that the government should be a channel for it. So, people on the ground there don’t care how they get their aid as long as it comes through and it’s just not coming through at the moment.

SAS And I think most of the deaths take place in the last weeks.

BQ And this is now?

SAS This is now.

LL This time round, how does the pace of the response compare?

BQ I think that really remains to be seen, it certainly does seem to be the case that aid is needed within days or within weeks in terms of fairly large concentrated levels in order to prevent an absolute catastrophe. There are organisations like International Rescue who say it’s too late, the catastrophe has already arrived and certainly Stephen O’Brien at the UN has been talking in very, very graphic terms and forthright terms about how aid is needed now. And you’ve got some donors in developed countries, the UK has allocated £100m to Somalia, but the problem is transferring the money actually into assistance on the ground, in a way it’s too soon to say whether that’s getting through expansively, but equally we can’t wait to determine that, it needs to happen now.

LL Thank you Ben. Thank you Simona. That’s the end of this episode of the Global development podcast. You can listen to all our podcasts on theguardian.com/global-development or on iTunes, SoundCloud or your favourite podcasting app. I’m Lucy Lamble and the producer is Kary Stewart. Until next time goodbye.