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Somalia

Humanitarian Situation Monitoring (HSM) - Key Findings, Somalia, December 2023

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KEY MESSAGES

  • Pervasive flooding in hard-to-reach districts may have increased Health and Shelter needs.

  • Widespread reliance on unimproved water sources and inadequate sanitation facilities in assessed settlements continue to put these settlements at risk of waterborne disease outbreaks. Lack of basic infrastructure, coupled with gaps in Health services, could allow water-borne diseases to spread further.

  • The absence of assistance persists across assessed hard-to-reach districts, with almost all settlements reporting that no aid was received by residents. Barriers such as distant aid locations, concerns about insecurity during travel, and limited access to information reportedly hindered communities’ ability to access humanitarian support.

CONTEXT & RATIONALE

Somalia’s protracted and dynamic humanitarian crisis includes ongoing conflict, climate-related shocks, and communicable disease outbreaks. Years of failed rainy seasons continue to exacerbate the precarity of agropastoral livelihoods, the consequences of seasonal flooding and insecurity – and may have caused an estimated 43,000 excess deaths in 2022.² Persistent and intense rainfall from October - December 2023, due to the dual influences of the Indian Dipole and El-Nino, could worsen the humanitarian crises in areas already affected by previous failed rainy seasons, ongoing insecurity, and limited access.³ Humanitarian needs may be particularly acute in the pockets of the country where humanitarian interventions are severely limited due to security concerns and physical access constraints – i.e. hard-to-reach (H2R) districts. These districts have already been categorized as Extreme Constraints or Hard-to-Reach by the Access Working Group (AWG)⁴ or Category 5 (catastrophic) by the Protection Cluster.

ASSESSMENT OVERVIEW

This key findings brief includes 1,685 Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) regarding 25 H2R districts in 460 assessed settlements across Somalia in the December 2023 and January 2024 round of the HSM assessment. During the interviews, KIs were asked about the humanitarian conditions and needs of people in H2R areas and their knowledge of the situation. The findings are indicative and cannot be generalised. When possible, comparisons were made across the last two rounds (August 2023 round and December 2023 round). See page 6 for more details.