The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Tuesday appealed for immediate action as severe drought risks pushing nearly half of Somali children under five into acute malnutrition this year, with hundreds of thousands needing life-saving treatment, reported Al Jazeera.
“Malnutrition has reached crisis levels,” Victor Chinyama, head of communications for the UN children’s agency UNICEF’s Somalia operations, told reporters in Geneva via video-link. on Tuesday.
Chinyama said it is time to act now. He warned that “if you wait until things get worse, or until famine is declared, it may be too late.”
Chinyama said children have been very badly affected by the hunger crisis, with 1.4 million of them, or nearly half of all those under the age of five, expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year. He added that 330,000 children will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition which can even lead to death.
The UN official said the UNICEF urgently needs $7 million by March to purchase the therapeutic foods needed to treat those children. He warned that 100,000 children with severe acute malnutrition will miss out on life-saving treatment without the additional supplies.
The UNICEF said it will utilize the money in getting 104,000 cartons of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTF) for the treatment of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
In a statement, the UNICEF Representative Angela Kearney said the numbers reported this year are quite high and alarming and that thousands of children are at risk of dying unless urgent measures are taken.
Kearney said any shortage of supplies in RUTF could imperil the lives of more than 100,000 children.
Somalia has been hardest hit as the Horn of Africa region as it faces its worst drought in decades, with the UN warning that 4.1 million people, a quarter of the Somali population, need urgent food aid.
