How Aid in Cash, Not Goods, Averted a Famine in Somalia

Young girls line up at a feeding centre in Mogadishu. Credit: UN Photo/Tobin JonesBy Roshni MajumdarUNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2017 (IPS)In February, when the government of Somalia sounded an alarm to the UN about risks of a famine in the country, the UN’s Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), besides quickly shuffling a response team, was acting from a steep sense of history. The Office, instead of sending out massive aid packages, distributed cash vouchers to families who could spend it to buy goods according to their needs. The famine between the years 2010 and 2012, which killed more than a quarter of a million people in the country, offered important lessons to the aid community. This spring, when poor rainfall led to large scale crop failure and a rise in malnutrition, the freshly elected government raised immediate alarm. A looming crisis stood to affect nearly 6.7 million people in the country, or more than half of the population.The new expansion of a cash-based strategy, largely owing to Somalia’s strong network of money vendors, ultimately formed the basis of a formal team, called the Cash Based Response Working Group 2017.This group, drawing from reports of 2011, formulated new means of distributing cash, quickly and efficiently. Jordi Casafont Torra, a humanitarian affairs officer with the OCHA, and who worked directly with teams on the ground to respond to the crisis, explained the distribution of money to all those affected.The new ways of sendi...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Africa Aid Combating Desertification and Drought Development & Aid Economy & Trade Featured Food & Agriculture Headlines Health Labour TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news