Editor TLN
March 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Some 43,000 people died in Somalia in 2022 due to the severe drought in the African country, half of them children under the age of five, according to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund. (UNICEF) that for the first time exposes an approximate number of deaths due to the lack of rain in the Horn of Africa.
After six rainy seasons lost, the experts have taken into account in this case the excess of deaths registered with respect to previous periods and conclude that, with the figures in hand, the current crisis is already being more deadly than that of the 2017 period -2018. In addition, its end seems distant, according to the forecasts that also appear in this report.
Only in the first half of 2023, up to 135 people will die per day, in such a way that the range of deaths in this semester will range between 18,100 and 34,200. Last year, the daily mortality rate already shot up from 0.33 to 0.38 deaths per 10,000 inhabitants –in children under five it was almost double– and in 2023 the figure will rise to 0.42 .
The study, prepared by British institutes and endorsed by the Somali government itself, places the southern and central areas of the country as the epicenter of the crisis, with special incidence in the Bay, Bakool and Banadir regions. The Somali Minister of Health, Ali Hadji Adam Abubakar, has appealed to the solidarity of the international community to “save lives” and “remove the risk of famine forever.”
The representative of the WHO, Mamunur Rahman Malik, has agreed that it is “a race against time” to prevent deaths that “are avoidable”, especially in vulnerable groups such as children. For the head of UNICEF in Somalia, Wafaa Saeed, the report published on Monday paints “a grim picture of the devastation” that the drought has brought to many homes.
Not surprisingly, the UN estimates that 7.9 million people need humanitarian aid in Somalia, almost half the population, due to a chain of crises that intermingle political instability, insecurity, extreme weather and, more recently, an increase in prices derived to some extent from the military offensive launched by Russia on Ukraine.
