Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned Tuesday that half of all children in displacement sites in southwest Somalia are acutely malnourished, the situation exacerbated by funding cuts and drought.
In June UN-backed experts estimated that almost a third of Somalis faced food insecurity, as the country, long wracked by insecurity and now seeing political turmoil, saw one of its worst droughts in years.
Since January the international medical charity MSF has screened more than 21,000 children under five in Baidoa, finding “acute malnutrition levels of around 50 per cent.”
A July survey of 888 households across 14 displacement sites in southwestern Baidoa, found only two per cent of families could afford three daily meals.
“It’s not an understatement when I say that a severe humanitarian emergency is unfolding right now in Baidoa,” Mitchell Sangma, MSF medical coordinator, told a press conference in Kenyan capital Nairobi.
“We are seeing an alarming increase in the number of malnourished children that we have admitted since January,” he said, saying their facility had expanded from 50 beds to 120 in June.
Visiting Baidoa earlier this year, he described how “our ER, our paediatric ward, our nutrition ward, even part of our surgical and maternity wards are filled with malnourished children.”
He said 90 per cent of the children presented with severe medical complications, with the NGO recording “unnecessarily preventable deaths in our hospitals.”
Exacerbating the issue was the downturn in global funding, MSF said.
“Somalia’s humanitarian response plan has been reduced by 40 percent in 2026 and was still less than one-third funded by July,” the NGO said in a statement.
As a result, Sangma said, MSF and other NGOs were prioritizing their life-saving over preventative programs, and were witnessing a “vicious circle” where patients were re-admitted to facilities.
His colleague, epidemiologist Chenoa Sankar, said re-admissions to MSF-backed programs were over 60 per cent.
“The mothers are very despondent when we speak to them because it’s almost inevitable that the child is going to be readmitted at some point, and there’s very little that they can do to control that,” she said.
The UN said that in the first three months of 2026, more than half a million Somalis were displaced, with nine out of 10 caused by drought.
Somalia ranks among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change, which scientists say is leading to more frequent and more intense incidences of extreme weather like droughts.
It is also facing increased insecurity as international funding falters, impacting the long-running battle against terror group Al-Shabab.
