The Somaliland Development Organization, a Dutch NGO that works in Somaliland, has launched its new web site to promote its activities and start work on new projects in the energy sector.
SDO Foundation is a Netherlands-based organization, which deals with improving the living conditions in Somaliland and the reconstruction of the county. SDO is a public benefit institution and independent of any party politics and clans.
The projects initiated and supported by SDO are realized in different cities of Somaliland. The location of the projects depends on the needs of the people in that region.
Al Shabab's ban on three aid agencies came as the UN announced plans to increase its presence in Somalia (file photo)
NAIROBI - Government officials, aid beneficiaries and humanitarian workers in south-central Somalia have condemned a ban imposed on three aid organizations by the Islamist group, Al Shabab, which controls most of the region.
"There is absolutely no excuse for this action," Abdi Haji Gobdon, the media adviser to Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, told IRIN on 10 August. "These are agencies that came to help the thousands of people who need their help. This is evidence, if any was needed, of Al Shabab's disregard for the welfare and wellbeing of the Somali people. They simply don’t care."
In a statement issued in Mogadishu on 9 August, Al Shabab accused World Vision, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) and Diakonia of proselytizing.
"Acting as missionaries under [the guise of] the humanitarian work these three organizations have been spreading their corrupted ideologies in order to taint the pure creed of the Muslim people in Somalia," the group said. "We warn other local aid agencies against taking up the operations or secretly partnering with the banned organizations, otherwise they will face appropriate disciplinary measures."
NAIROBI - The United Nations and foreign missions and organisations will move back inside Somalia within two months after an absence of more than 17 years, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday.
Most embassies, foreign charitable organisations and the United Nations itself have been based in Nairobi because of security concerns in most of Somalia and near-daily gun battles and mortar attacks in the capital, Mogadishu.
The U.N. left Somalia in 1993 and most embassies withdrew years earlier.
Augustine Mahiga, the U.N. special representative for the Horn of Africa country, said a decision to relocate senior staff to Somalia had been taken by U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon.
The European Commission has adopted a €35 million funding decision to support humanitarian activities in Somalia. It is estimated that approximately 3,200,000 people, about 42% of the population of Somalia, would need emergency humanitarian assistance and/or livelihood support in the first half of 2010; at the same time field assessments suggest that the situation is unlikely to improve in the second half of this year. The €35 million Decision adopted today will address a wide range of relief interventions in the following sectors; health, nutrition, food aid/food security, water and sanitation, non-food items/shelter, disaster risk reduction, logistics, security, and the coordination of partner operations.
Kristalina Georgieva, Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, said: "Somalia people are the first victims of the deadly combination of continuous fighting and adverse climatic conditions. Their extreme resilience has been stretched to the limit. Many Somali die in silence for lack of food, medical and sanitary care. We cannot let them down however difficult and dangerous the conditions are for our relief-work-, The Commission as leading humanitarian donor will continue its long-standing commitment to address the main humanitarian needs of the Somali population."
Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout sits with a child in Mogadishu, Somalia, in this undated handout photo.
CALGARY — An Alberta woman who was held hostage for more than 15 months in Somalia has started a foundation to send women in the war-torn country to university.
Amanda Lindhout hopes the charitable foundation will be able send 10 women to school next year and 100 women over the next four years in the country where only four per cent of women pursue higher education.
"The scholarship program is based on the concept that each woman has the potential to make substantial contributions to the future development of Somalia," she said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press on Friday.
Lindhout was snatched off the side of the road outside Mogadishu along with Australian photographer Nigel Brennan in August 2008. The pair, who had been working in Somalia as freelance journalists, were freed last November after their families teamed up to hire a hostage negotiation group.
NAIROBI, Kenya — A World Food Program spokesman says three gunmen have killed a WFP-contracted driver in central Somalia in what is believed to be clan-related violence.
Peter Smerdon says the Somali driver was killed Friday outside a hotel in the town of Galkayo.
Smerdon told The Associated Press that WFP has no indication the slaying was connected to his employment with the organization.
Somali refugees near the borders of Kenya and Somalia waiting to get back to their homes and some waiting to move on to different part of the world. They live day by day.
Prompted by a rapidly deteriorating situation and growing displacement in Somalia UNHCR is seeking additional funds to ease the plight of Somali refugees in neighbouring Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti and those forcibly displaced inside their country.
The two supplementary appeals being launched today in Geneva address the increasing needs in Somalia and four neighbouring countries as well as the extension of the Ifo camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Including an additional US$ 60 million being sought today, UNHCR's overall budgetary needs in Somalia and its four neighbouring countries in 2010 presently amount to US$ 424.7 million. So far this year, UNHCR has received 36 percent of its global comprehensive needs budget.
Escalating violence in southern and central Somalia has forced an estimated 200,000 Somalis to leave their homes this year alone. The vast majority remain displaced within the country as it is getting more dangerous and difficult to flee across the borders.
"The displacement crisis is worsening with the deterioration of the situation inside Somalia and we need to prepare fast for new and possibly large-scale displacement," said UNHCR Deputy High Commissioner Alexander Aleinikoff, who has visited Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya within the past two weeks.
Officials with the aid group Doctors Without Borders say they do not know why Islamist insurgents attacked one of the group's clinics near the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The attack Wednesday forced the clinic to shut down.
There is growing concern for thousands of internally displaced people who relied on the clinic for free medical care.
The aid group Doctors Without Borders says it is still investigating the attack on its Hawa Abdi clinic, located about 20 kilometers south of Mogadishu, on a road that connects the capital to the town of Afgoye. Officials with the group, known by its French acronym MSF, declined to speculate on a motive for the attack.
Witnesses say heavily-armed Hizbul Islam insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at the clinic before storming it. The attack sparked a firefight between the insurgents and security guards at the clinic, killing one guard and wounding others.
Hizbul Islam fighters briefly detained 20 local staff before shutting down the clinic. The closure has reportedly spread fear and panic among tens of thousands of internally displaced people who have received free consultations and medical care at the clinic since 2007. Hizbul Islam, one of Somalia's two main radical Islamist insurgent groups, has not responded to claims it targeted the clinic.
Interview with UN special respresentative for Somalia
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah: U.N. special representative for Somalia
Peace in Somalia is not only possible but is 'relatively easy' to achieve, according to Ambassador Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, a veteran diplomat who has served as Mauritania's foreign minister and ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the European Union and the United States.
Since 2007, he has been the UN secretary-general's special representative for Somalia, a country that has not had a functioning government since the 1991 ouster of Mohamed Siad Barre, a dictator who was maintained in power during the Cold War by both the Soviet Union and United States, successively.
With violence intensifying and the humanitarian situation deteriorating, Ould-Abdallah says it is time for diplomatic and humanitarian efforts to move inside Somalia, relocating from neighboring Kenya where several thousand international civil servants are engaged in peace-keeping and delivering assistance to the nearly three million people dependent on outside assistance for food and other necessities.
Ould-Abdallah wants the UN Security Council to create a secure zone inside the beleaguered Somali capital of Mogadishu – similar to what was done in Iraq and Afghanistan – so that the United Nations operations he directs, as well as the international NGOs delivering aid, can operate inside the strife-torn country. He was interviewed in Nairobi by AllAfrica's Reed Kramer. Excerpts:
There is a widely shared perception that the Somali crisis is irresolvable. Do you share that view?
Not only don't I share this perception that the Somalia crisis is hopeless. On the contrary, I believe it is relatively easy to address. Those who think that the Somalia crisis is intractable, cannot be resolved, are victims of a great manipulation, put forward by a very smart, articulate alliance between a few Somalis, some foreigners and some organizations, in order for them to keep doing very lucrative business in total impunity. Business in studies/ projects, but also in trade especially imports/ exports, illegal fishing, piracy, etc.
Mohammed Noor Hajir arrived in Dadaab in 1992 a year after it was opened. He considers himself to be 'one of the luckiest men alive' having escaped Somalia and having been able to bring up his children in a peaceful environment. He's hoping to be resettled in a third country, probably the United States or Canada.
The European Commission has allocated €3 million in humanitarian aid for programmes to support refugees in Kenya's Dadaab camps. Around 267,0000 refugees are currently accommodated in Dadaab, which was designed for just 90,000 people. The refugees have fled Somalia due to the ongoing insecurity caused by two decades conflict.
Peter Zangl, the Director General of the European Commission Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO), who is currently in Kenya visiting Dadaab, said: "Given the extreme overpopulation of the camp, living conditions have become particularly harsh. In 2009, we witnessed an average arrival of over 6,000 refugees every month. The new funds will allow us to bring additional support to the refugees and displaced persons in the camps by providing health assistance, water and sanitation, non-food items as well as protection."
Samira Timan Buulle has lived in a tent made of old clothes in Garowe for the past eight years. She fled her home in Baidoa due to conflict Photo: Daniel Dickinson/European Commission Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO)
Eight years of living in a tent made of old clothes, with little food, medical services and no sanitation facilities has taken its toll on Samira Timan Buulle, her six children and two grandchildren. She has the world-weary expression of someone who has had to put up with the harshest of conditions and for whom the future offers little escape.
Samira is one of around 2,000 people living in an impromptu settlement on a small patch of waste ground in the town of Garowe, in the autonomous region of Puntland, north of Somalia. She, like most of her neighbours, is a victim of the lawlessness that has engulfed Somalia over the last two decades.
She was forced to flee inter-clan fighting in her home town Baidoa in the south of the country to the relative security of Garowe, about 1,000 kilometres away.
'Many of my family were killed; the fighting made it impossible to stay in Baidoa. We had no life there,' she says. During the eight years she has spent in Garowe, she has been safe but has been living a desperately poor existence, earning perhaps US$1 for collecting rubbish and washing clothes.
'We have nothing here. No medical care, little food, no toilet. My children can get ill easily as everything is so dirty. Until the war is over in my country, I cannot see the situation improving,' she says.
This dusty and hot settlement which goes by the name Riiga, is desperately poor. The tents, densely lined up alongside each other, are stitched together with old material and some plastic sheeting. Most people go to the toilet in the dry riverbed just metres away where rubbish is also dumped.
A Somali woman and her children in Mogadishu making their way to safety
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and award-winning actress Angelia Jolie is calling for more international attention and assistance for thousands of Somalis trapped in the country’s capital of Mogadishu by some of the deadliest violence to date.
“I am deeply troubled by the complete and utter disregard for human life in Somalia,” said Jolie, echoing recent calls by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres.
“I appeal to those who carry on fighting not to shell and target civilian neighbourhoods,” Jolie added.
Nearly daily fighting between Government forces and its supporters, backed by African Union peacekeepers, and Islamist rebels has killed or injured more than 900 people last month in Mogadishu.
The UN estimates that 100,000 people were displaced from or within the capital city since the beginning of the year, and more than 170,000 in total across the country.
Many displaced people are living in poor conditions and depend on food from NGO and UN. Fighting and politics is not allowing distribution of food to most needy
Somalia's government has asked the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to release food stocks in Mogadishu for distribution to hundreds of thousands of needy internally displaced persons (IDPs), Interior Minister Sheikh Abdulkadir Ali Omar told IRIN on 19 April.
"I made the request a few weeks ago and up to now we have had no response; life for the people in the camps [mainly on the outskirts of Mogadishu] is getting worse every day," Omar said, adding: "Many families have already run out of food."
He said WFP food should be distributed to them "instead of being locked in a store. People are hungry, yet we have food in stores."
The minister said the Transitional Federal Government would provide security in areas under its control and the food would get to those most in need.
"There should be no fear that this food will be used for anything other than to help the displaced and those most in need," he said.
Thousands of displaced Somalis rely on food aid from WFP
The UN World Food Programme has denied a claim that up to half the food aid to Somalia was being diverted to Islamist militants and corrupt contractors.
WFP officials said there was no evidence to back up the claim made in a report by a UN monitoring group.
The UN's aid chief in Somalia said the report was based on "hearsay" and not backed up by any documentary evidence.
The aid chief, Mark Bowden, said the flow of funds to the WFP operation in Somalia had dropped after the report.
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