Fatuma Hassan Hussein and her young children had traveled more than 100 miles to reach a camp for displaced Somalis in Baidoa.
Sitting in a ramshackle shelter, Hussein was tired and hungry.
“Shankaron had a fever, she cried the whole way,” she said. “We didn’t eat this morning. We haven’t had a proper meal in 10 days. We are still waiting for food.”
Hussein and her family are not alone. United Nations officials estimate that more than 6 million people, which is more than half of Somalia’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance amid warnings of a coming famine.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu, his first field mission since taking up his position. There, he warned that the slow-moving crisis facing the Somali people has been “neglected” by the world.
“People are so obsessed with spectacular crises like the war in Syria, that these chronic situations tend to be neglected,” Guterres said.
Even in camps like Baidoa, food is scarce. Noor Ibrahim, who fled to the camp two weeks ago, said many of the new arrivals hadn’t received food aid. “Even in the camp, people are dying of hunger and sickness,” Ibrahim said.
The United Nations has launched an appeal for $825 million for the first half of the year in order to conduct a pre-famine program.
Speaking with CNN, Guterres asked countries to pitch in for that program, as a moral obligation, as well as what he called “enlightened self-interest.”
“It is this extreme poverty, it is the dramatic situation in countries like Somalia that creates all the conditions for terrorism to prosper,” Guterres said.
In addition to drought and famine, diseases, such as cholera and measles are beginning to spread.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 6,000 cholera cases have been reported since early January. There have also been 2,500 reports of cases involving suspected measles.
The International Organization for Migration has warned that if “action is not taken immediately, early warning signals point towards a growing humanitarian crisis in Somalia of potentially catastrophic proportions.”
On Saturday, Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire announced that 110 people had died from starvation and drought-related illness.
Khaire made the announcement while speaking to the drought committee in Mogadishu, four days after President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo declared the drought a national disaster.
The death toll covers those who died in the rural areas of Somalia’s southwestern Bay region, where the drought is more severe than other parts of the country. It was not immediately clear how many others have died in the rest of the country.
