NATIONAL MEDIA
9 July – Source: Radio Shabelle – 86 Words
Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Sadik Warfa held a meeting with Turkish Ambassador, Mehmet Yilmaz at his office in Mogadishu on Monday. During their meeting, the two officials discussed a range of issues, mainly pertaining to the country’s ongoing labour enhancement and how both their governments can collaborate in the areas of employment and creating opportunities for the country’s youth.
Minister’s Sadik’s meeting with the Turkish Ambassador comes three days after his ministry successfully held a week-long training on enhancing labour policies and erecting competent workforce in the country.
8 July – Source: Radio Ergo – 592 Words
Abdullahi Ahmed Mohamed was one of 45 students sitting for this year’s national examinations at Shaygosh School in Korahe region of Ethiopia’s Somali regional state. As the son of a nomadic pastoralist family, he was burning with curiosity as a boy of eight and ran away from home in Yo’ob village near Dollow to join the school he had heard others talking about. “The boys used to come back home talking about a new life, new systems and things we had never heard about. They talked about what they learned and how they benefited. I thought why not visit and see what they are talking about!” Abdullahi told Radio Ergo.
Shaygosh is the only school in the state that provides free education, food and boarding accommodation for pastoralist children. Run by the state government, it has 34 teachers including five women. Despite the community’s conservative traditions and cultural apprehension about sending their children to school, especially the girls, Shaygosh has been seeing increasing success with its enrolment strategy over the last few years. The deputy principal, Ahmed Abdi Ibrahim, said the school struggled to attract students when it opened in 2007, but it now has 620 students including 76 girls. The staff has been conducting awareness campaigns to convince the elders of the benefits of sending children to school. “In the first year we opened, there were no girls at all in the school, and by the third year, there were just five girls. We are still struggling to get female students,” said Ahmed Abdi.
Nimo Mohamed Ali is one of the first five girls who joined Shaygosh School at the age of eight. She said her friends already in the school pushed her to join. “I told my mother about this good school and I said that I wanted to join, although she still needed me at home. My mother was quickly convinced and took me to the school, where I was registered and I got my admission,” Nimo recalled. She was among the first batch of female students to graduate in 2018. She is now studying management and administration at Qabri-dahre University…..
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
9 July – Source: Star Tribune – 1000 Words
As the crowd gathered at the mosque for the Friday afternoon prayer, Mohamed Daoud handed a St. Paul Fire Department sticker to a curly-haired boy and showed his father a flier about checking hydration levels. Seeing Daoud in a uniform, the father was confused. Was somebody hurt? There was no emergency at the Minnesota Da’wah Institute that day. But Daoud and his friend Abdi Warsame, who was handing out fliers nearby on checking blood pressure, have grown accustomed to questions in recent days: They just became the first Somali-American firefighters in St. Paul. Before they started their shifts at the fire station, they wanted to greet worshipers at the mosque and tell them about what the fire department does.
“As-salaam alaikum,” Warsame told a stream of men at the door. Peace be upon you. Daoud, 24, escaped the war in Somalia and resettled in Nairobi, Kenya, as a boy. He recalled the slow response of emergency personnel to the fires in his neighborhood. After arriving in St. Paul as a refugee in 2014, he was struck by the efficiency of the fire department and wanted to join. He went to work as an emergency medical technician, sometimes translating while patients were transported to the hospital, before applying to be a firefighter.
Warsame, 28, took a course in medical office support but realized that he didn’t want to work an office job. His uncle, a paramedic, inspired him to follow suit. He rode along with fire crews and saw how firefighters worked, ate and cleaned together and wanted to be part of their team. Warsame was also drawn to the career after seeing paramedics treat his brother’s asthma. He applied to many fire departments and thought he’d hit the lottery when he was accepted in St. Paul, where he grew up. He believes that having Somali-American firefighters respond to calls in the Somali-American community can build trust for first responders. Some elderly Somali-Americans do not know how to read the labels on their medications, and being able to translate makes a fire crew’s job easier in emergencies, he said.
“Seeing somebody who can look like you, who can speak the same language as you, who can understand you on another level — it just brings the tension down,” Warsame said.The pair persisted in fire training — including running up stairs with a bundle of fire hose — even through Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that requires fasting during daylight. The men were among 23 who graduated into the 435-member fire department…..
9 July – Source: Xinhua – 257 Words
The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) commanders ended their three-day meeting in Mogadishu on Monday featuring further enhance coordination with the Somali security forces to implement the transition plan. Under the transition plan, the AU mission will transfer security responsibility to Somali security forces ahead of AMISOM’s anticipated exit in 2021.
Francisco Madeira, the Special Representative of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission for Somalia who closed the meeting, lauded the Somali security forces for carrying out recent offensives to liberate areas in the Lower Shabelle region. “This commitment shows that Somalia wants to move forward despite existing challenges. The work of their national forces deserves increased support,” Madeira said in a statement issued after the meeting. The commanders, along with their Somali counterparts, met in Mogadishu to evaluate the progress made in implementing the mission’s concept of operations (CONOPs). The CONOPs provides a framework to guide the implementation of AMISOM’s gradual transfer of security responsibilities to the Somali security forces and exit from Somalia.
During the meeting, the commanders also discussed the operational readiness of the Somali security forces, which is crucial to the successful implementation of the Somali transition plan. Madeira lauded the Somali government and international partners for supporting AMISOM to fulfil its mandate. “I recognize the role our partners are playing in training and creating the conditions necessary for operations to take place. We are implementing the Somali Transition Plan and the AMISOM exit strategy. The progress made so far indicates that we are on track in executing our mandate,” he said.OPINION, ANALYSIS AND CULTURE
“ Every drought depletes their assets: their animals will die, their crops will fail, they will have nothing to sell and next season they won’t have money to buy seeds to plant again. In desperation, pastoralists sell their animals at a giveaway price, leaving them even more vulnerable. Doing so significantly reduces their number of cattle to below the minimum threshold required to continue raising livestock. At this point, they begin to flee and become displaced, often in informal camps near urban settlements.”
OPINION, ANALYSIS AND CULTURE
“Every drought depletes their assets: their animals will die, their crops will fail, they will have nothing to sell and next season they won’t have money to buy seeds to plant again. In desperation, pastoralists sell their animals at a giveaway price, leaving them even more vulnerable. Doing so significantly reduces their number of cattle to below the minimum threshold required to continue raising livestock. At this point, they begin to flee and become displaced, often in informal camps near urban settlements.”
8 July – Source: The Guardian – 714 Words
The climate emergency is wreaking havoc across the world, and it is the poorest countries that bear the brunt of the crisis. In Somalia, where I am acting country director for the aid agency Islamic Relief, the population is currently experiencing a drought that could threaten the lives or livelihoods of more than two million people by the end of the summer, according to the UN.
The climate has been wreaking havoc on Somalia’s seasons. Ordinarily, there are four: the main rainy season between April and June (gu), the second rainy season between October and December (Deyr), and the dry seasons that follow each of them. Two-thirds of the country’s population lives in rural areas and are completely dependent on the rains for their crops and livestock. Last year, these people were set back when the Deyr season produced less rain than usual. And again this year the gu rains almost failed, eventually arriving in tiny pockets of the country too little, too late. This has led to widespread crop failure, and a decline in livestock production, rapidly pushing communities in the worst-affected areas into food insecurity.
In recent years, the frequency and duration of these dry spells have increased. As it does so, the capacity of people to resist these shocks decreases. Every drought depletes their assets: their animals will die, their crops will fail, they will have nothing to sell and next season they won’t have money to buy seeds to plant again. In desperation, pastoralists sell their animals at a giveaway price, leaving them even more vulnerable. Doing so significantly reduces their number of cattle to below the minimum threshold required to continue raising livestock. At this point, they begin to flee and become displaced, often in informal camps near urban settlements.
I recently saw how extreme weather can throw the delicate lives of the most vulnerable off-kilter. Our staff met Geelo Ahmed Osman, a mother of five from Ainabo district, Somaliland, in an informal camp for internally displaced people (IDPs), where she now lives. She has been entrusted with a great deal of responsibility. Four of her five children are disabled with conditions so severe they cannot move without assistance – and her fifth is completely emaciated with malnourishment. Because her husband had a stroke last year, she is now the breadwinner for the entire household.
Two years ago, another drought hit Osman and her family hard. Her household, who were pastoralists, lost all their animals. In the two years since they have been entirely reliant on handouts from their relatives, and when their relatives could no longer offer to support them, they moved to the outskirts of Ainabo district and joined an informal IDP settlement in the hope that they will get assistance from aid organisations.
The current drought has led to more and more people like Geelo Ahmed Osman, displaced from their homes and reliant on support from the international community. About half of the country’s population is in need of emergency assistance. If they don’t receive this, we are very likely to see a full-scale famine before the end of the year. Lack of water does not just have nutritional implications: it spreads disease. If people don’t have water to wash at critical times, they can’t stem the spread of disease, which becomes inevitable in crowded IDP camps. Things such as diarrhoea, if untreated, can be fatal to children….. |
