With famine knocking at the door
Children screened for malnutrition and referred for treatment
Baidoa, South-West Somalia – As a strong breeze swirls over the dusty expanse of land that is now a camp for internally displaced persons in Baidoa, the flapping of loose plastic sheeting from the hundreds of makeshift tents is drowned out by the playful shouting of excited children.
The curious children crowd around, shouting questions at the two-person nutrition team armed only with a lined sheet of paper and a measuring tape – a mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC) tape.
“What are you giving us today?” asks a young boy. “What are you here to do?”
Rahma, a nutrition volunteer, adjusts her headscarf and smiles at him. “Where is your mother - and your younger siblings?” she asks the boy.
The boy and his friends point towards the huddle of plastic and grass huts in the background as they move on, losing interest almost instantaneously.
Rahma and her colleague Hussein, stride towards the group of mothers standing outside their huts, clutching babies and with younger children in tow. Rahma gets straight to the point.
“We are here to assess the nutritional status of children between 6-59 months and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers – and this simple tape will let us know whether you need to visit the health centre for treatment or not,” she says. She holds up the short tape, which is mostly green but has a small yellow strip towards the end as a middle section and an even smaller third section which is red.
They begin with Hawa and her 19-month-old daughter Sumaya. Gently, they push one end of the MUAC tape around the child’s tiny mid-upper-upper arm, and when the tape is comfortably wound, it comes to a stop at the red section of the tape.
Hussein immediately notes her name, her age and the reading on the tape, and hands the mother a red referral slip.
“You must take your child to the health centre immediately and show them this,” says Rahma. “She is suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and must receive treatment.”
The nutrition volunteers explain that if Sumaya receives treatment soon, she will recover and become healthy again; if she delays treatment, the little child’s life could be in danger. The mother nods gravely and accepts the slip of paper. The nutrition team move to the next mother.
This MUAC screening of children and vulnerable women is timely as large swathes of Somalia, have been borne the brunt of the devastating drought for the last four years which has decimated crops and killed millions of animals. The same climatic conditions have also made 26 per cent of the population (4.3 million persons) critically food-insecure and has displaced over 1.17 million Somalis.
MUAC screening enables UNICEF and partners to quickly expand nutrition programmes to preposition supplies at health and nutrition centres, and to increase capacity of stabilization centres to avert this looming nutrition crisis facing the children of Somalia.
Almost a third of these displaced persons are living in more than 400 informal settlements for internally displaced persons in Baidoa, with NGO partners reporting an average of 10 new households arriving every day. As the year unfolds into a fifth failed year of failed rains, the situation gets more dire by the day, the UN recently warned.
The Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) estimates that half a million children are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year.
“If the numbers are high, the nutrition partners know there is a need to quickly increase our supplies and capacity of treatment centres,” says Hanad Karie, a nutrition officer with UNICEF.
UN agencies, including UNICEF and government and NGO partners, are working round the clock to avert this humanitarian crisis, dramatically increasing prepositioned supplies and resources for therapeutic foods to treat the thousands of children and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers.
UNICEF thanks the European Commission Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection (ECHO), the UK Government (FCDO) and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) for supporting nutrition programmes in Somalia.
