The international community has to remain engaged to help people become self-sufficient
LONDON (AlertNet) - The world must end its “stop-start” approach to helping Somalia and should not abandon the country as the hunger emergency eases, the Red Crescent has warned.
“Whenever there is a crisis and the media show the situation with pictures of malnourished children, everyone comes in and then when the situation is under control everyone leaves,” said Somali Red Crescent President Dr Ahmad Hassan.
“We want to end this in-out, in-out, in-out approach. We need to think about rebuilding the resilience of communities – otherwise the same thing happens every year.”
Drought and conflict have left some 2.3 million people – a third of the country - in need of aid. The United Nations declared Somalia’s famine over earlier this month, but Hassan said it was crucial the international community remain engaged to help people become self-sufficient.
Long-term humanitarian assistance is particularly vital in the south of the country, he added.
Hassan said some donors appeared to be on board, notably Britain and the European Commission’s humanitarian arm ECHO.
He was speaking after leading humanitarian agencies met in London on Monday ahead of a Feb. 23 international conference on tackling Somalia’s chronic instability.
Efforts to respond to the country's worst drought in decades have been hampered by fighting between al Shabaab Islamist insurgents and forces backing Somalia’s interim government.
Al Shabaab, which holds swathes of central and southern Somalia, has banned some aid agencies from territory it controls. Military operations have also prevented help getting through.
Hassan said aid agencies hoped Thursday's conference would call for all parties in the war to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access and would recommend that anyone who violated international humanitarian law be held accountable.
SIDELINED
Monday’s meeting brought together U.N. agencies and humanitarian organisations from Muslim and Western countries as well as local Somali organisations who feel the international community has previously given them the cold shoulder.
Somali groups said they believed some aid money coming into the country was being wasted and called for the establishment of an external body made up of Somalis and the international community to monitor funds.
Zahra Hassan, co-ordinator of the Somali Humanitarian Operational Consortium, a new umbrella group for local development organisations, said Somali groups must be allowed to play a decisive role in getting the country on its feet.
She said there were well over 200 local groups in Somalia who were providing many of the sorts of services a government might normally deliver and who often had better access to communities than international agencies.
“There are organisations doing fantastic jobs but they are not in the circle. We’re trying to pull them in and bring them to the table,” she added.
“They want to be heard. They want to be part of decision-making and (they say) recovery and development should be led by the Somalis, whether from the diaspora or local.”
Hassan also accused donors of dictating programmes without asking local people what they needed.
“Please, before you give funds, listen to these people and what kind of projects they want. Please don’t impose whatever you want because you are the donor,” she said.
But she added that she felt optimistic about the future. “I saw for the first time in history that Somalis had one voice ... We want to be in charge of our destiny because we have been used to being outsiders. It was a coming together – the international and the Somalis on one platform,” she said.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
