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Overview
In 2022, Somalia faced the most protracted drought in recent history resulting from five consecutive seasons of below-average rains. The drought conditions were exacerbated by transformational effects of global food crisis, lack of stability and weakened security, and persistent levels of subnational conflict leaving 6.7 million people severely food insecure.
To respond to increasing humanitarian needs, WFP scaled-up its humanitarian assistance, increasing the number of targeted food insecure people by 50 percent (from 4.5 million to 8.9 million). WFP’s timely food and nutrition assistance helped avert famine in 2022. WFP reached 9.8 million direct beneficiaries across its operations (59 percent females, 41 percent males), of which 6 percent were people living with disability. Out of these, WFP reached 6.9 million unique beneficiaries with General Food Assistance.
WFP delivered its assistance using cash-based transfers (CBT) and in-kind modalities. In 2022, WFP doubled its CBT compared to 2021 distributing USD 470 million, the largest CBT transfers in WFP globally. Use of CBT in emergencies is critical to building resilience against droughts and other crises in the longer term and ensuring assistance is timely while also strengthening local economies.
WFP delivered first line assistance to vulnerable populations, in line with the integrated response framework for Somalia. This intervention focused on expanding access to populations in hard-to-reach areas and covering new internally displaced persons in formal and informal settlements across the country. Over 290,000 new beneficiaries received WFP’s first-line assistance across 13 hard-to-reach areas.
WFP leveraged the potential of Baxnaano to deliver USD 6.7 million of CBT, providing early support to 201,534 people under its largest drought anticipatory action intervention in Eastern Africa. This was complemented by a public information campaign on climate and weather risks enabling communities to pre-empt and mitigate the impact of worsening drought.
WFP scaled up treatment of moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) programme, reaching 1.6 million children aged 6-59 months and pregnant and lactating women and girls (PLWGs) with specialised nutritious foods. WFP implemented the prevention of acute malnutrition programme which reached 710,782 children aged 6-23 months and PLWGs. This prevented children and PLWGs from recurrent cycle of acute malnutrition. Monitoring has shown strong outcomes of the malnutrition treatment programme, with a recovery rate of 97.7 percent, well above SPHERE Standards (>75 percent).
Severe food shortages and the inability to cover school expenses due to the drought affected the ability of Somali families to send their children to school. WFP supported around 189,000 school children with nutritious school meals, inclusive of those in drought-affected areas, helping them to return and stay in school.
WFP’s life-saving work is complemented by longer-term investments to change lives, namely strengthening the capacity of Somalia’s institutions, and enabling Somalis to break the cycle of dependence on humanitarian aid and become more resilient against shocks. Under the World Bank-funded and government-owned national Safety Net for Human Capital Project, WFP processed the delivery of USD 182 million predictable CBT on behalf of the Government. The project reached 200,000 chronically food-insecure households (1.1 million people) as a part of the regular safety net entitlement. WFP also provided technical support in populating the Unified Social Registry, a national data repository of the 1.2 million chronically poor and vulnerable people, and a fundamental infrastructure for cash-based transfers.
Livelihoods, resilience, and food systems interventions reached 123,462 drought-affected beneficiaries. These programmes work to protect, build and rebuild vulnerable livelihoods and local food systems in times of drought and other crises.
WFP Somalia started to operationalize the Country Capacity Strengthening Strategic Framework, reaffirming WFP’s commitment to institutional and project-specific capacity strengthening, and evidence generation across five domains (assessment, analysis, and communication; planning, implementation, and monitoring; coordination and collaboration; mobilization and advocacy; Evidence-based policy advocacy).
WFP harnessed its comparative advantages and strengthened its partnerships with the Government, UN Agencies,
INGOs, and communities to contribute towards SDG 2 (zero hunger) and SDG 17 (partnerships for the goals). WFP worked with stakeholders to meet critical needs while leveraging opportunities to support national systems, including the implementation of shock-responsive social protection and resilience programmes. Contributing to SDG 17, WFP continued to be an enabler of humanitarian response by managing the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service, leading the logistics cluster, and co-leading the food security cluster with FAO.