Save the Children Canada

Published purpose

(December 2011) Somalia continues to be home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. An estimated 4 million people (perhaps 50% of the country's population) require humanitarian assistance as a result of the ongoing effects of the most severe drought in sixty years and of two decades of conflict and insecurity. One and a half million Somalis within the country have been forced from their homes and nearly one million more reside as refugees in neighbouring states. At the end of 2011, three areas of southern Somalia remain classified by the UN as famine zones, suffering from extremely high rates of acute malnutrition and child mortality. With support from CIDA, Save the Children Canada is providing emergency nutritional support to an estimated 40,000 drought-affected and displaced people living in camps around Mogadishu. Through a combination of therapeutic and supplementary feeding programs, as well as the provision of potable water and proper sanitation facilities at its four nutrition centres, Save the Children is helping to reduce and reverse the effects of acute malnutrition and stop the spread of disease amongst the target population.