A conversation with Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the World Bank, moderated by BBC Correspondent Andrew Harding
Andrew Harding (BBC)
Hello, everyone. My name's Andrew Harding. I'm a BBC correspondent, currently the BBC Africa correspondent. We're here to talk about the drought in Somalia and across other parts of the Horn of Africa. The reason I've been picked to chair this meeting is because I've got quite a lot of experience in covering past droughts in Somalia, the 2011 famine, the 2017 -18 drought that was very nearly a famine, and the current drought, which has been teetering on the brink of famine. I've been back to Somalia three times in the past two months. I've been a couple of times to Baidoa City, right at the heart of the current drought, a city surrounded by the militants of al-Shabab, where there are hundreds of thousands of families now seeking shelter, seeking help.
I have also been to Dolo, on the border with Ethiopia, another place of safe haven, if you like, where families are trying to get help. And I've been to the Hiran region a little further north, an area right now very much preoccupied not just with the drought, but with Somalia's conflict, a big push by government and local clans against al-Shabab.
The picture that I've seen is bleak indeed, not only in the camps, but of course in the hospitals, in places like Baidoa and Dolo, where you see many, many severely malnourished children, most of them under-fives. We saw children who were dying. We saw children dying. We saw children who were being saved by the humanitarian aid that is getting through.
There are a lot of organizations trying to help out, trying to cooperate. And it's that that we're here to talk about today, to introduce you to some of these agencies that are operating there, to find out from them what they're seeing, what they're able to achieve, what they'd like to do better, and how Somalia and its neighbors can help fix this terrible problem and the deep problems behind it, the war, but particularly, of course, climate change.
We are joined by David Lambert Tumwesigye, global advocacy manager for child poverty and an expert on social protection. He is a Ugandan, but he's from Save the Children and currently in the UK. We have Perrine Piton, Chief of Party, Building Resilient Communities in Somalia. That's the “BRCiS” consortium based in Nairobi. It's led by the Norwegian Refugee Council. It's a consortium involving many different agencies trying to work out how best to work together to help Somalia. And we have Afrah Al-Ahmadi, a senior social protection specialist from the World Bank, also currently in Nairobi.
David, let's go to you from Save the Children. If you could tell us, please, a little bit about what Save the Children is doing right now in Somalia, in particular, what you're achieving and what you're struggling with.
David Lambert Tumwesigye (Save the Children)
Thank you very much, Andrew. It's always very good when we get to talk about the problems that are challenging the continent. And this is a very good opportunity to have such a discussion. Save the Children is really passionate about ensuring that children's rights are front and center of what we do. We consider ourselves a child rights organization and anything such as the harm go with the climate crisis that affects children is very dear to us.
And so we've been talking and working with colleagues in the region, including the World Bank and UNICEF and WFP, on how to respond to these interconnected crises. As an entry point into the work we do, we have to conduct analysis. We recently launched a report based on consultations with over 50,000 children globally, to discuss how they are being impacted by the climate and inequality crisis. Now, I was just looking at a graphic from this report where we've got more than 160 million children in eastern and southern Africa affected by conflict, poverty and the high climate risk. So we really have a very big problem on our hands. And we want to support governments to build systems that can deliver for children and make sure that the future generations of children are well-nourished, well-educated and healthy, because that's really the future of the continent.
Andrew Harding
And are you making progress? I mean, clearly, from what we saw in Somalia, not enough is being done. Do you feel you're getting the funding, the resources, the support?
David Lambert Tumwesigye
Well, I mean, I think there is a very big problem because although the climate crisis is acknowledged by most of the countries that have committed to provide financial support to the countries most impacted by it, they are not delivering on their commitment. And so, this is really one of the greatest challenges that we are facing in our response to this crisis.
Andrew Harding
Let’s go now to Perrine Piton in Nairobi. You've led this consortium. Tell me why a consortium and what sort of work are you managing to do in Somalia through this consortium that you wouldn't be able to do working separately, siloed, if you like?
Perrine Piton (Norwegian Refugee Council)
Yes. Thank you, Andrew. So, yes, the consortium BRCiS was actually created in the aftermath of the 2011 famine. So as part of the “Never Again” thinking of a number of institutions and agencies in Somalia, that's when people thought we need better response systems that are more agile, that are faster, but that can also operate at scale, and are also closer to the field, and more anchored in the local practices and the local communities. And that's when BRCiS was created. The purpose of the consortium is for the agencies that are part of that platform to find new and innovative solutions that are going to mitigate the impact of drought of course, but also eventually prevent the worst and the most irreversible impacts of these situations.
So, for example, as part of our response, since the beginning of the year, we're seeing a lot less displacement outside of the communities that we are supporting. We're supporting our communities and we're supporting them with integrated packages of interventions that they can access at the same time: support to purchase water, but also health and nutrition services that are delivered in their villages, as well as these cash transfers that are so important for people's resilience because it enables them to just make the right choices for them and their families.
So that's basically what we've been working on and that's the power of a consortium. You find something that works and then you scale it up to the entire consortium, which is what we've been doing recently for example, with the water. A lot of agencies are doing water trucking by procuring water themselves and then delivering it to the communities.
What we are doing is that we are letting communities procure their own water and they are doing it at a far better price. And this means save lives because when you save money in this context, you save lives and you're when you're fast, you also save lives.
Andrew Harding
And just give me a bit more of an explanation as to how it actually works with all these different NGOs and groups. You coordinate between them, is that right, so there's no overlap. Wasn't that happening already?
Perrine Piton
There are coordination systems in the in the in the humanitarian picture, of course. But the way that we can make it work within a group of organizations is that we can, from the get-go, decide during that period this institution is going to operate in these areas and going to deliver these services and then that other institutions will be there. All of these packages are integrated so that communities and local authorities have one interlocutor. So if there's something wrong, if they have a complaint, they know who they're talking to. They don't need to go and find across like five separate agencies. Of course, in these types of crises you have lots of displacement. The scale of the issue is huge.
You need more than one consortium, you need a lot. You need actually many consortia working together in integrating their action.
Andrew Harding
Okay. Thank you. That's something I heard a lot from people on the ground, particularly in Baidoa, was this push to try and stop these vast movements of people coming in, to the cities, to the towns, where they simply couldn't be looked after well enough. And that push to try and build, as you say, resilience, which in practical terms means helping them where they are, helping them to keep their cattle, to keep their fields alive so that they can stay where they are and hopefully, as you say, long term, keep that agricultural life alive and that, I guess over the longer term moves away from humanitarian issues and into development. How to enable Somalia in particular to trap the rainwater that floods through it and then just disappears into the sand or into the sea or wherever.
Afrah Al-Ahmadi from the World Bank. You’ve just come back from Mogadishu. And I know you were in meetings there with the British and others. Tell me, what is the World Bank managing to achieve at the moment?
Afrah Al-Ahmadi (World Bank)
Thank you, Andrew. The World Bank is obviously not a humanitarian agency. It's a development agency. Traditionally, the Bank has perceived that it doesn't have a role during humanitarian crises and always stepped in sort of at the end of a humanitarian crisis. In recent years we’ve realized as an institution that waiting until crises are over and then coming into the development space actually delayed the development process of countries. And we came to a realization of the importance of stepping in even during crises and working within that nexus of humanitarian and development work. This is basically our approach in fragile and conflict settings like Somalia and a number of other countries in the Africa region.
I’ll say more about what we’re doing in the social protection sector. Up until, I would say maybe 2017-2018, the social protection space was predominantly a humanitarian space. The government did not have a significant role in responding to crises and reaching people with a response. The Bank since early 2019 has been supporting the government of Somalia to establish a social protection system, a national or government-owned, government-led social protection system. This engagement is recent, but it has extremely encouraging progress in the past three years. On the specifics, Somalia has developed a social protection strategy, a very ambitious strategy which actually does look into Somalia transitioning from a protracted dependency on humanitarian responses into more developmental approaches to addressing challenges that lead to humanitarian crisis, climate being one, conflict another, and the overall development as well.
Since 2019, the Bank has been supporting the central government of Somalia to institute its first national social safety net program, the shock-responsive safety net for human capital program, which is locally known as the Baxnaano Program. The program is funded by the Bank, implemented by the government under government leadership, but it also engages a partnership with the with some humanitarian agencies to benefit and leverage some of their experiences and skills until Somalia is ready with its own delivery systems.
Andrew Harding
In layman's terms, what are we actually talking about? We talk about social development and protection, but where does conflict, where is climate change, where does education, where does hunger figure into that?
Afrah Al-Ahmadi
The national social safety net program is a cash transfer program and has dual objectives. The first is addressing chronic poverty, chronic food insecurity by enabling households to smooth their consumptions. And that's through providing social assistance that goes directly to the pockets of households. A second window looks into addressing long term poverty, chronic poverty, through a multi-year, predictable cash assistance which also supports these households to access human capital types of services, health, education, income generating activities, productivity, livelihoods and so on.
Andrew Harding
We saw a fair amount of that cash transferred onto people's mobile phones in the camps around Baidoa and the WFP was involved with other agencies. I want to ask David and Perrine about that as well. To what extent you are involved in that kind of not new, but certainly increasingly popular process of getting cash straight to people rather than simply trying to give humanitarian aid?
David Lambert Tumwesigye
I think that cash is one of the most evidenced development operations in recent two decades, and in part because I think there was a lot of skepticism about cash and all the wrong things it could do. And thankfully the evidence has been the opposite. So Save the Children is very big on cash. We believe that social protection systems that restore income security are the foundation of shock response.
And so we actively promote the development of national certification systems that guarantee that families have a minimum level of consumption that can enable them to invest in their children and in their own livelihood. So cash for us is king. And, you know, it's one of the most effective and cost- effective tools you can use to deliver. And there is a lot of technology to get this into so many hands very quickly.
I think that the COVID pandemic has demonstrated how robust big cash delivery systems across the world have been. The other very important lesson that came out of that is that countries that had well-established and mature systems responded much faster, while countries in our part of the region that had, you know, new, maybe narrowly targeted programs really struggled to deliver food aid and things like this.
And so that really catalyzed the momentum around galvanizing all the resources we have around building social protection systems that are enduring, that you can count on whenever there is a shock. And so shock-responsive social protection is really fundamental to the work that we do supporting governments but also within our own humanitarian operations. Because I think that's the bridge between what we do when there is a crisis - and cash makes you do things very quickly - but also when there is a national system, it's much easier to deliver this support and scale up either in terms of the value of the money or the scope of the programing you can achieve.
Andrew Harding
One thing we saw in the camps, at least we heard about, was the despite the enthusiasm for the cash to fund transfers, there was the problem of gatekeepers, as in communities which are still very vulnerable, where al-Shabab and other clan leaders are often treating these communities, particularly women and children, majority communities are sort of cash cows. We heard a lot of evidence that phones were being stolen or people were being given certain SIM cards and then the money was being stolen or most of it was being taken in a form of sort of protection racket, if you like. I wonder whether that's something that that you've encountered or what you think of the sort of ineffective processes like cash transfers and what could hold them up?
Perrine Piton
Cash is an amazing tool and mobile money specifically is amazing for humanitarian response. It's also very good for social protection as we're seeing and even for that sort of ramping up and exiting poverty. But it's just a tool. It is not a solution. So, yes, all of the things that you see apply to cash the same way that they apply to any entitlement. There are lots of safeguarding that you have to put in place and there's nothing that will replace people on the ground. At the end of the day, if you're going to do good humanitarian programing or good famine response, you need to have staffing. You need to have people there in these camps and you need to have different mechanisms to provide feedback.
And you need also a lot of community engagement. These gatekeepers. Yes, they're gatekeeping. They're also part of the community and are close to the community. So those are people you need to engage with. If you do a lot of “top down” work and if you're not present in locations, then these things are necessarily going to happen.
But with the cash and you know, we can't get technical, there are lots of ways that you can use cash and we've just seen two different ways you can use it for social protection. You can also use it for a famine response. But there are lots of other ways that you can use cash to guide a response or to fine-tune solutions. And this is also, you know, you were mentioning before the ecosystems and the fact that you need sustainable solutions for people to actually thrive in the countryside in Somalia. There is also a way forward in terms of using cash responses to guide these types of processes. But yeah, the protection issues are there. The agencies have lots of mitigation strategies in place.
Nevertheless, you'll always see some of these things. We do have cash programing in our countries in Europe, and there is always some money that's being diverted even in the best organized societies. And so that's something we have to be very careful of and keep in mind. But there's no perfect system. We have to deal with these risks as they arise.
Andrew Harding
Okay. We've been talking not optimistically but positively about what people have learned, what's being done, what can be done. Just a quick-fire round if I may. Can you each tell me the one thing that maddens you most, not in your day-to-day work necessarily, but in terms of fixing things on the ground in Somalia, in terms of the fact that we still have this terrible drought, this enormous suffering. What needs to change immediately? What is holding you back institutionally on the ground? Afrah, let's start with you.
Afrah Al-Ahmadi
Yeah, I'd rather focus on the positives, but since you're pushing us to focus on the challenges…Maybe, Andrew, if you allow me just before I get to this point, building on an earlier point on the importance of addressing the root causes of continuous influxes of displaced people, leaving their communities and looking for the next available humanitarian response when any crisis hits. The Baxnaano program, that is supported by the World Bank, pays attention and by design focuses on reaching people in the rural areas with long term multi-year cash assistance support and additional productive and livelihoods support. Now, this is very critical because when communities and household are supported where they are and they know that they are receiving support on a continuous basis, it mitigates them from having to leave their community and then therefore decreasing the case load and the need for humanitarian response, which is very tight when we deal with humanitarian crises at the scale that we have been seeing in Somalia again and again.
So the question is, how do we deal with humanitarian crises but in a developmental way? It will be a little bit slower. Of course, we have in the short term to save lives, that's for sure, but not - and this comes maybe to your point on the challenges - not to lose sight, in the crowd and the focus of just running to save lives, of addressing, you know, the deep causes of the problem. And that is basically providing opportunities to the poor and vulnerable in their communities so that they aren’t pushed out of their societies. Now, linked to that, if you're building a national system, then you need also an alliance of the donor community that is being very generous with humanitarian response- then you need that same level of alliance and generosity to support the system.
Andrew Harding
And you’re not seeing that?
Afrah Al-Ahmadi
We still have a long way to go, there.
Andrew Harding
Very diplomatic, as one would expect from the World Bank. Perrine, are you going to be a little less diplomatic?
Perrine Piton
I guess I am. But on the other hand, I also concur with Afrah. I mean, it's not even about What is the challenge at the moment? The moment is a challenge. And it's been since the beginning of the year or even since last year, we've gone 12 full months trying to alert the world and to make people pay attention to what's happening in Somalia.
But Afrah is right, it's not just a crisis this year. It is a protracted crisis that keeps on peaking and peaking and peaking and will peak higher and higher as years go by, unless all actors, national, international, come together around a vision. And I think that vision needs to have something to do with climate resilience. It needs to involve all national actors and needs to be localized, and it needs to gather people around a common purpose.
Andrew Harding
David, do you share that frustration? Do you have other frustrations?
David Lambert Tumwesigye
Well, I think for me, my frustration is the sheer scale of the crisis compared to what kind of response is coming to address it. Because the report I talked about shows that 116 million children in eastern and southern Africa are living in poverty and exposed to this climate risk. In actual fact, you know, in Kenya, Somalia and this year alone, more than 6.4 million people need food support and and droughts are doubling, child marriages related to that are increasing, the risk of school dropouts is tripling.
If you think about it from a development point of view, where is the continent headed? And when you compare that with the level of support that governments are putting in, you know, it's really not commensurate. And I say this because I know that our governments in the region have been spending lots of money on infrastructure. I'm not saying infrastructure is bad, but actually most of our governments think that spending socially on things like social protection or greater investment in education and health is not as productive as investing in the so-called productive sectors. And I think that's not right because the evidence suggests, for example, in Uganda, we saw analysis that showed that investing in a national certification system generates three times as high as investing in an infrastructure project.
I think the challenge is getting the political will to balance investment in the physical infrastructure with the human infrastructure, which is important because we are in the new information age. You are as good as your people. And so I think unless we start investing in our people, making sure our children are well nourished and protected from these protracted crises, until we do that, we really are going to be inefficient in our development investments. And so that's for me my greatest frustration. And I hope that with all the momentum behind the recently concluded COP 27, we can get governments to revisit their national climate policy and plans and ensure that these plans include investments in systems that can help people, families to adapt much better.
For example, in Kenya, we've been supporting the government of Kenya with UNICEF to pilot universal child benefit. If a system like that was in place, as was the case when several countries were responding to COVID, a disaster like this wouldn't have as much negative effect as it does when you don't have a system. So, these are the things we can do that are very tangible, that generate immediate returns, sometimes even higher or commensurate to investments in infrastructure. Because if you invest in cash, the money goes straight to the market, the transporter, the farmer. Everybody in between is getting something. And this can actually stimulate greater investment and recovery of our economies. But I don't think that in terms of priority, these investments are seen as strategic as the physical infrastructure. If we can get that right, I think we have a chance.
Andrew Harding
David, I'm sorry. We really need to give everyone a chance. Just a final round: could you just briefly talk about what you're seeing that is being done in terms of addressing some of the fundamental structural issues such as mitigating the effects of climate change?
Afrah Al-Ahmadi
This may be outside my area, but I know that there are efforts to build an early warning system. The country needs to invest in adaptable agricultural sector. Again, it touches on the same issues of financing and building institutions to support and promote such a vision.
Perrine Piton
I guess the first good news is that there is a Climate and Environment ministry at the level of the government for the first time for Somalia. So I hope that this will bring change from the top down. I have to say that, at the moment, I think in terms of adaptation, which is the big focus area for Somalia, we are still not there in terms of funding and in terms of knowledge and capacities to actually develop the right adaptations for Somalia. So that's definitely a challenge ahead.
David Lambert Tumwesigye
I'm optimistic, and I think that if we can build social protection systems that are inclusive, then we have a fair chance at ensuring that when shocks such as climate shocks, drought, floods come, we are able to swiftly respond and prevent the loss and damage that many households endure for so many years. And I just wish that governments can prioritize investments in this issue because that's our response. That's our adaptation plan. And so, if we in our national climate and development plans can align these systems to address the demand side, then the response side of things with the long-term development plan, it will be amazing.
Andrew Harding
Great. Well, thank you all very much, David, Perrine, Afrah. I found that very interesting, a mixture of the gloomy, as you say. David, the funding isn't there. Perrine, the world isn't paying enough attention over multiple years and is still addressing it too often as a sort of urgent crisis to deal with today rather than a long-term crisis. But Afrah, from you from the World Bank, clearly, some really joined up thinking with the Somali government, which clearly is very engaged now in ways to try, in admittedly a fragile and difficult climate, both because of the conflict, both because of weak institutions and so on, but is trying to find ways to build up that resilience and to help millions of Somalis to live meaningful, decent lives with cash in their pockets and a social infrastructure to support them and to keep them in the communities and the farms, which at the moment they are abandoning.
So thank you all very much.