NATIONAL MEDIA
2 July – Source: Halbeeg – 122 Words
Somali Prime Minister, Hassan Ali Khaire, held talks with traditional leaders and community representatives in Guriel on Tuesday. The premier made a stopover at the town as his tour to criss-cross the Galmudug region continues. Khaire and cultural leader, Ugas Hassan Ugas Mohamed Ugas Nur, discussed the role of the traditional leaders in reconciliation and re-establishment of government services in the region.
The PM underlined that his tour in the region is solely based on the resumption of government services, the institution of state with a strong foundation with good working relations with the federal government. Ugas Hassan Ugas Mohamed Ugas Nur thanked the PM efforts in peacebuilding and reconciliation while presenting him a horse as a reward for his commendable actions.
2 July – Source: Radio Ergo – 490 Words
Fadumo Moalim Ali, 27, is one of the 24 women candidates competing in the clan–based selection process for the next round of representatives to the Jubbalandregional state parliament in southern Somalia. She has been trying to convince elders from her clan to give her a chance to serve as their representative in the parliament. “The traditional elders are part of the obstacles denying women opportunities in politics,” complained Fadumo, a mother of five. “When you seek a chance from your own clan, they tell you that you are married to a certain other clan and so you are not one of our clan members.”
Somali society typically holds a conservative notion of women’s role in family and community life, rarely offering them positions of political leadership. A married woman, moreover, is assumed to belong to the clan of her husband. Nevertheless, Fadumo– born and bred in Kismayo– says she is ready to do her utmost to get into public office. “I believe I can bring changes,” Fadumo told Radio Ergo. “I hope to win this fight. As women, we are somehow isolated as male candidates have both the support and the finance, but still that will not weaken our resolve,” she vowed.
Jubbaland State has the second lowest number of women legislators in Somalia, with only four women out of the 75 members of the assembly. Behind Jubbaland comes Puntland State, which has only one female lawmaker. Fatuma Farah Adan is one of the four female members whose term ends this month. She believes women need more external pressure to bring about change. “During our time, the pressure from IGAD [regional body] and the international community gave us the chance to be selected. My seat was initially allocated to a man but after continued pressure, my elders chose me,” she explained…..
2 July – Source: Somali Journalist Syndicate – 447 Words
Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS) condemns the physical assault and threats against TV journalist Abdulaziz Billow Ali and his cameraman Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed by an official from the Somali Prime Minister’s Office on the eve of July 1st, 2019 in Mogadishu.
At 1 pm local time on 01 July 2019, inside the premises of the Prime Minister’s Office, Abdulaziz Billow Ali, Mogadishu-based correspondent for the China Global Television Network (CGTN) was physically assaulted, harassed, threatened and their camera equipment nearly broke down by the director of the Prime Minister’s Residence, Abdirahman Dirie is known as “Goomey” after the journalist refused to record the director’s press statement on behalf of Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire, according to journalist Billow.
According to journalist Abdulaziz Billow and other journalists who saw the incident, the TV crew was recording Vox Pop clips about the 59th Anniversary of Somalia’s Independence Day when the director of the Prime Minister’s Residence, Mr Goomey interrupted and ordered the journalist to record his Independence Day statement which the crew turned down. “When we explained about our program, he [the official] started to physically assault me by hitting me several times and tried to damage our camera,” journalist Abdulaziz Billow Ali told SJS ” he told us ‘if you do not record my speech, you will no longer be able to continue working here’ and ejected us from the facility by force and threatened to harm me and my crew should I return there again.” The TV crew left the premises without executing their journalistic duties after this official called members of the security soldiers and according to journalist Billow the situation could worsen should they not leave the premises immediately…..
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
3 July – Source: The Star (Canada) – 325 Words
When Somali Edmontonian Khalid Hashi visited his sick grandmother in a hospital in Somalia in 2017, he was very frustrated at the lack of record-keeping or exchange of information between doctors. “My mother was calling me, asking me, ‘What’s going on with grandma’ … I was in the hospital for eight days and I couldn’t give her an answer,” he recalled. “There were doctors who were switching shifts often, but there was no method of recording what the previous doctor had done.” To help families and friends of future patients in hospitals in Somalia, Hashi created OGOW (that’s the word for “know” in Somali), an electronic medical records system in the Somali language, in June 2018.
On Monday, his project was one of five to win OpenIDEO’s — an innovation platform based in San Francisco — global challenge influencing caregivers. The challenge received hundreds of ideas from 128 countries. The group shortlisted 32 ideas in April and selected the Top 5 on Monday to receive $10,000 in funding to support their innovations. Although Hashi’s project originally started as a medical records program for hospitals, the funding from OpenIDEO is specifically to help tackle immunization challenges. “We are evolving our solution to refine it, to tackle a specific challenge,” he said.
The funds will go to creating an app that will provide resources in Somali and English, such as immunization timelines and education on the benefits of vaccines, to caregivers and practitioners. Although Hashi has no background in medicine or IT — he works for Habitat for Humanity — he decided to take on the responsibility of helping hospitals in Somalia and reached out to friends who were doctors and developers. With their help, and raising money from the community as well as investing his own, he created the software in June 2018. He said after his experience trying to get information on the health of his only surviving grandparent, he felt compelled to do something.
OPINION, ANALYSIS AND CULTURE
2 July – Source: Al-Jazeera – 935 Words
It is late-morning in Dadaab, the semi-arid refugee camp in northeast Kenya. Abdirizak Salat, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans, removes a set of keys from his right pocket and bends down to open the iron sheet door to his tailoring shop. “I am late for work today,” he tells his neighbour after exchanging greetings. Salat cleans his shop, which is filled with clothes and three sewing machines, before his first customer arrives.
The 30-year-old is among the 26,000 Somali refugees living in Kenya, according to the UNHCR, who were ready to travel to the US before being stopped by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in 2017. Half of them had been interviewed by US officials while the others were to be interviewed by the State Department, with some 14,500 of them living in Dadaab, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“I sold everything that I had because I was told that I passed all the vetting required for me to be resettled in the US. The news of the ban devastated me. I did not know where to start,” says Salat, a father of three who was two years old when his family came to this camp in 1992. His resettlement process began in 2007. After 10 years of undergoing a series of interviews, security, medical and background checks, his case was finally approved for November 2016, when the US was preparing for presidential elections. “I remember getting the news about my approval. I was so happy. I came back home and informed my parents and family. I knew my life was about to be better.”
But the good news was short lived. A week after taking office in January 2017, Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries. The ban suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for four months and anyone coming from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Months after the order, lower courts in the country described the ban as unconstitutional, but, in June 2018, the US Supreme Court reversed the decision in a 5-4 conservative majority ruling….. |
