ReliefWeb

Current Nutrition Situation

The median Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) prevalence has remained Serious (10–14.9%) for the past consecutive seasons (11.8 Post Deyr 2020/2021, 11.8 in Gu 2020, 13.1% in 2019/20 Deyr and13.8% in 2019 Gu’). Some of the aggravating factors are reported to be COVID-19 pandemic, localized flooding, drought, desert locust infestation and conflicts that contributed to increase the vulnerabilities and continued to be the predominant predisposing factors to malnutrition. In addition, limited access to and high process of food, water shortages, lack of access to basic services like primary healthcare, immunization, vitamin A supplementation, sub-optimal feeding practices and childcare, and safe drinking water & sanitation and increase in the prevalence of acute watery diarrhea is some areas were also some risk factors for malnutrition.

Consequently, acute food insecurity is expected to remain high in Somalia through December 2021, driven by the varying impacts of localized floods and below-average rainfall, localized locust infestation in central and parts of southern Somalia, and the economic contraction linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. This may contribute towards the deterioration of production outputs, social economics increasing vulnerabilities of households. These culminations result in impact on the states of acute malnutrition situation affecting children and women. To closely monitor the nutrition the nutrition cluster initiated biweekly reporting mechanism.
Although no significant increase of admission caseload observed when compared with same period last year (2020) except the drought and flood affected districts especially Jowhar. But levels of acute malnutrition could increase through the end of the year in line with seasonal trends and due to the extended combined impacts of drought, floods, and insecurity. To improve the situation, integrated programming, and linkages to (WASH, Health and FSL) are needed.