A mother’s sacrifice for the world to see
AAMINA. Fawzia. Nala. All mothers. All grief-stricken. All women whose heroic efforts to save their children were not enough. Mother after mother who I spoke with while in Somalia last month told me of burying babies on gruelling walks from drought-destroyed livelihoods to the hope of help, the search for water.
They are part of a rolling tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa, where a climate-induced catastrophe has hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of famine.
Every minute in Somalia, a child is admitted to a health facility with the deadliest form of malnutrition. Many don’t even make it that far.
Hunger is a lethal threat but so too is its companion, disease. When children are severely malnourished, they are about 10 times more likely than well-nourished children to succumb to conditions such as diarrhoea or measles. And so the world waits to see if famine will officially be declared in Somalia.
By the time famine is declared, at least 20 per cent of households face an extreme lack of food, at least
30 per cent of children under the age of five are suffering from wasting or other forms of acute malnutrition and people are dying each day due to outright starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
We cannot wait for famine to be declared before we act to save lives. Twenty years ago I started working for UNICEF, in Angola. Since then, I have worked from Zimbabwe to Ethiopia, Kenya to Mozambique.
What struck me then, and continues to move me now, is the lengths families and communities take to protect their children.
A mother carrying her child and walking for 18 days; a grandfather giving the last of his maize to families on the move; a father working a world away to provide for his family.
Somalia has had three big droughts in just over a decade, on top of flooding, and a biblical plague of locusts. Children living in Somalia barely have any carbon footprint and yet they are among some of the most exposed citizens on the planet to climate and environmental shocks. As such, Somali mums and dads can no longer face these odds alone.
I had an old schoolmate in Goulburn who used to say he didn’t buy lotto tickets because he “had already won the lottery … the lottery of birth”. Perhaps then it’s moments like these in Somalia when we need to cash in some of ‘that win’ and come together against common enemies of poverty, drought and inequality so as to assure a more fair go for all. Because when early action is taken in the face of drought and malnutrition – as happened in Somalia in 2017 – the results are overwhelming.
Children’s lives are saved, the devastating and permanent damage of malnutrition on children’s brains is prevented and countries’ workforces and economies benefit.
Facing famine is not as ‘simple’ as feeding mouths. It is reaching people in very remote communities surviving in the face of prolonged drought. It is trucking in clean water when the groundwater wells are dry; it is providing medical teams and supplies to treat malnutrition and related diseases.
In Somalia alone, UNICEF teams have treated 300,000 children with the most severe malnutrition this year and supplied water to half a million people in just three months. Innovation is being set in motion. Successful work on mapping groundwater using geospatial imagery and data is already underway in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia to improve water systems and help families build their resilience to climate change.
Other solutions require leadership and honesty. Governments and business must fulfil the promises they have been making. We also desperately need more parties to step up and commit further flexible resources for the Horn of Africa, to ensure UNICEF and partners can move quickly and efficiently and to make sure that all children’s needs are accounted for.
We know how to save and protect lives in Somalia now and in the long term but as a global community we must not wait any longer to act.