Somalia’s Women Have Endured Enough
The malnutrition wards in Somalia’s hardest-hit regions are eerily quiet. These are the places where health workers treat children whose hunger has become life-threatening. You expect children to cry when they are suffering, but they cannot summon the energy. The women holding them are silent, too. Every one of those mothers had already done everything she could before she arrived.
One of my earliest humanitarian missions took me to Somalia. I was young, and the experience shaped me in ways I did not fully understand at the time. Last month, I returned with Plan International, the aid agency I now lead.
Each time my plane descends over Mogadishu’s sun-bleached sprawl, I arrive hoping to find that life has changed for the better. And over the years, in many ways, it has. Governance has strengthened. There are more opportunities for young people. On this recent visit, I met a new generation of Somali leaders and advocates, including many inspiring adolescent girls, who are ambitious for their country and determined to shape its future. There is real progress to build on, and real reasons to be optimistic for Somalia’s future.
But that progress sits alongside a much harsher reality. More than 6.5 million Somalis are now sitting on the edge of severe hunger. I have seen Somalia at the brink before: in 2022, when famine was narrowly averted, and in 2011, when famine killed more than 250,000 people, half of them children under five. Somalia’s resilience has carried its people through drought, conflict and displacement for decades. But resilience is not infinite, and Somalia is now facing a perfect storm of compounding pressures that are unlike anything I have seen before.
Last week, the United Nations warned that this El Niño is “supersizing before our eyes.” The World Meteorological Organization has called it “exceptional,” saying it could become the most powerful in the agency’s 50-year history and deliver a devastating blow to communities and economies worldwide. The World Food Program estimates that it could push some 50 million people into acute hunger. For Somalia, years of failed rains and punishing drought could now be followed by severe flooding.
This is stacking on top of a population that has already exhausted so much of what it has to fall back on. A geopolitical crisis in the Gulf has doubled fuel prices and stranded critical fertiliser on ships. Humanitarian funding is retreating at precisely the moment it is needed most. Each of these alone would be serious, but together, they could be catastrophic.
On this latest visit, I spent time in displacement camps in Baidoa, a remote city now home to 1.6 million people, nearly half of whom have been displaced. Some have been forced out of their homes by the militant group al-Shabaab. But for many rural families, the progression into crisis is painfully familiar. A harvest fails. They begin selling livestock to keep the family going. Those animals are not simply possessions; they are savings, insurance and security. When the livestock are gone, there is often nothing left to sell, and families are forced to leave. By the time people arrive in displacement settlements, like in Baidoa, their resilience has already been tested again and again.
There is a pattern to who bears the greatest burden of a crisis like this. When a household is plunged into extreme poverty, it is usually the women and girls who eat last. When water is far away, it is women and girls who walk for it, and who take on the risk of violence that walk carries. When a family is displaced, it is overwhelmingly women and children who arrive in displacement settlements.
Across Somalia, four in five displaced people are women or children. Somali mothers are at the center of how families have survived this crisis, holding households together under extraordinary pressure. But there is a limit to how much they can carry.
In Baidoa, I met Luul, a mother of eight who had arrived the night before, having walked for a month with her children. She arrived with nothing. When I asked what she would feed them that night, she showed me a handful of wheat. When I asked about tomorrow, the displaced families around us answered for her: if we eat, she eats.
Somali women are often the first people to respond when crisis hits. Communities support one another long before international assistance arrives. That solidarity is one of the reasons people have survived repeated shocks. As a mother myself, I cannot imagine what it takes to walk for a month with eight children and arrive with so little between them and starvation. But I have seen enough to know this: the mothers never stop.
I met another mother living with seven family members under a makeshift shelter. When I asked how the shelter would cope with the heavy rains and flooding El Niño that are projected to soon hit Somalia, she just shrugged and told me she could not think that far ahead. Her only concern was finding enough food for her children that night. That is what repeated crisis does. It narrows people’s world from next month, to next week, to tonight.
I have thought about that shrug a great deal since. Because we now know what is coming for her shelter. Famine early warning analysts have identified a credible risk of famine in southern Somalia between October and January if the flooding this El Niño brings is severe and widespread.
The stories I heard in Baidoa are not isolated. They are the human face of a crisis that is accelerating across the country. Around two million people are now facing emergency levels of food insecurity, more than double the number a year ago. Half of children under five are acutely malnourished, including nearly half a million who are severely malnourished. Nearly one in five households lacks reliable access to water. And in overcrowded displacement camps, outbreaks of diphtheria, measles, cholera and malaria are already spreading — with flooding likely to make them worse.
For girls, every new shock narrows the horizon further. When schools close after a climate disaster, the most significant barrier to child marriage is removed. When families are displaced, girls face heightened risks of violence, exploitation and trafficking. In one Baidoa camp, an 18-year-old told my colleagues that girls there walk for hours to find water, and that some have been harassed and raped on the way. She also described girls being married off against their will in exchange for money to feed the family. That is the arithmetic of a climate crisis at household level: not an abstraction about emissions, but a calculation about which girl’s future gets traded for a chance at the family’s survival.
We have the power to prevent a catastrophe in Somalia. The evidence is clear: every dollar invested in preventive action saves an estimated seven dollars in emergency response. We know what is coming. We have the forecasts, the data, the early warning systems. Investing in prevention now is not just the compassionate response — it is the fiscally rational one. We have done this before. We know it works.
And yet the world is seemingly choosing not to. This year, global humanitarian funding is barely a third funded. Less than one per cent of humanitarian spending goes on acting before a disaster rather than after it. There is a mismatch between how aid architecture has been designed, a reactive, emergency-focused one, and what the system demands in this situation: a preventative, anticipatory approach. The gap between what we know and what we are willing to do is not a gap of knowledge or capability. It is a gap of political will.
In years of working on Somalia, I have learned one thing above all: its people do not give up.
As the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly gathers in New York, delegates will have before them the UN’s own warnings about El Niño, identifying the very settlements I walked through. They will not be short of information. The question they must ask themselves is whether they are willing to match the Somali people’s determination and resilience with action.
The window to prevent catastrophe is closing, but it has not closed yet. The women I met in Baidoa are not waiting to be rescued; they are already doing everything they can to keep their families alive. The world must stop treating their endurance as a substitute for action — and act before the silence in those hospital wards spreads.