Foreword
Message from WR
This is the first issue of this quarterly update for 2023. I take this opportunity to wish all our friends, colleagues, partners and donors a very happy and prosperous 2023.
This year, WHO marks the 75th anniversary of its founding in 1948. Since that time, ensuring the health and well-being for everyone, everywhere has been the main mandate of the Organization. WHO’s core principles and values are aptly reflected in the work of the Organization in Somalia: a country with a low universal health services coverage index and one of the highest infant mortality rates and maternal mortality ratios in the world. Against this backdrop, it was a huge undertaking for WHO, working with the government and partners, to make the fragile health system work for everyone, make the interventions effective in saving lives, prevent avoidable diseases, and make the health services accessible and available to everyone. On 6 April 2023, in an event organized by the WHO country office on the occasion of World Health Day and attended by the Minister, Deputy Minister and State Ministers of Health, all the heads of UN agencies, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, ambassadors and heads of missions, this determination to Dr Mamunur Rahman Malik WHO Representative in Somalia improve the health and lives of the Somali people was reiterated and acknowledged.
While the country started to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme drought and hunger plagued the country further resulting in devastating the health outcomes. Half of the population are in need of humanitarian assistance, about 2.9 million people are internally displaced and more than 4.9 million people are facing crisis or the consequences of acute food insecurity. WHO’s mortality estimates show that 43 000 excess deaths might have occurred in 2022 as a direct impact of drought and extreme hunger, with half of them being children younger than 5 years. This number was not high enough to declare a famine, but is heart-breaking as every death and every life that could be saved counts for WHO. The fragile health system, fragmentation and non-availability of services, large distances and security concerns rendering health services inaccessible, and provision of adequate health care close to people have always been a challenge. WHO has taken up this challenge by deploying community health workers and outreach health teams to provide essential and life-saving health care and immunization services to these vulnerable people who are trapped in the pervasive and perpetual cycle of displacement, drought and disease. The fact that famine, which was expected to occur at some point last year, has been pushed back speaks to the value and strength of the work of WHO in Somalia in accessing these hard-to-reach people and delivering the essential health care they need during this time of crisis.
At the same time, WHO has continued its normative work uninterrupted and to the maximum. This quarterly update provides a summary of these works which WHO does every day to ensure health for all.