Saturday, July 23, 2011
In a statement issued in Nairobi on Friday, the medical charity also appealed to the world including Somalia neighbors to remove all hurdles that currently prevent the expansion of independent aid inside the Horn of Africa nation.
"Every affected person should receive aid, inside Somalia or when fleeing to neighboring countries," Jean Clement Cabrol, Director of Operations of MSF said in the statement.
Cabrol said Kenya and Ethiopia host the vast majority of Somali refugees and should prioritize the opening of new camps and improve the existing ones.
But he said the international community has a shared responsibility to help Somalis seeking refuge by ensuring efficient registration, adequate food rations and shelter in existing and new camps.
"The current bureaucratic restrictions and obstacles are causing unnecessary delays and all measures should be taken to respond to the emergency," Cabrol said.
Nearly half of the Somali population - 3.7 million people - is now estimated to be in crisis, with an estimated 2.8 million of them in the south.
The agency is currently reaching 1.5 million people in Somalia, and is scaling up to reach an additional 2.2 million people in the previously inaccessible south of the country.
MSF said the current crisis is mostly affecting the Somali people, adding that to assess the full needs of the population and to expand its emergency response in this complex environment, independent and immediate access inside Somalia was essential.
With limited assistance available in Somalia, thousands of Somalis arrive each week to various camp locations in the border areas of neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.
MSF teams report extremely high malnutrition rates amongst new arrivals.
One child out of three suffers from acute malnutrition.
"Together with their families they face many delays because of an official closed border policy, administrative hurdles at reception sites in the camps before having to compete for the limited aid available in overstretched, chaotic and overpopulated refugee camps such as Dadaab in Kenya and Dolo Ado in Ethiopia," MSF said.
Throughout the affected region MSF is treating over 10,000 severely malnourished children in its feeding centres and clinics.
Weakened by 20 years of armed conflict, the condition of the Somali population is aggravated by failed harvests due to drought and by dying livestock and high food prices.
MSF said ongoing restrictions on the movement of international aid workers and on the supply lines of their organisations have further delayed and limited the aid available to the population.
The UN agencies have welcomed the recent statement by the insurgent group Al Shabaab, which controls areas of southern Somalia, that humanitarian aid will now be allowed into those parts of the country.
However, the militant group has since denied lifting the ban and said it would not allow banned aid agencies to operate in the drought-affected south, describing UN declaration of famine as "propaganda."