To inform humanitarian planning and operations by providing information on needs, displacement dynamics, and access to services in hard-to-reach settlements in South Central Somalia where physical access for humanitarian actors is restricted or impossible due to insecurity.
2. Rationale
2.1 Background
Somalia is experiencing the third drought episode in a decade, following three consecutive failed rainy seasons. The drought is compounding existing food insecurity among both pastoral and farming populations, and needs are spiking across the region – 7.7 million people are currently estimated to be in need of humanitarian help, and 6 million are forecasted to face acute food and water insecurity during 2022.3 Prevailing La Niña conditions, which typically bring below-average rainfall to the eastern Horn of Africa, are most likely to result in a historic, fourth consecutive below-average rainfall season in April-June 2022, according to Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) partners at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), Climate Hazards Center, and United States Geological Survey (USGS). Despite overall below-average rainfall, parts of Somalia will remain prone to flooding during the April-June 2022 rain season.
While information about the severity of needs in accessible areas is often available, thanks to partners’ assessment efforts in the context of rapid assessments and broader, periodic, country-wide assessments, information on needs in hard-to-reach areas remains very limited. Further, while country-wide analyses on climatic shocks are available, these are rarely cross-referenced with primary data on populations’ needs in the field.
The May 2022 round of Hard-to-reach (H2R) data collection will focus more specifically on addressing critical information gaps regarding the vulnerabilities of H2R communities to climate shocks (drought and flooding in particular), as well as the social, economic and environmental impacts that climatic shocks may have had in these areas; this will be done by leveraging KI knowledge of H2R areas, as well as cross-referencing information provided by KIs with satellite imagery, where relevant. The specific focus on climatic shock is born out of the results of the December 2021 round of H2R data collection, which indicated extremely high needs in the areas assessed, tied to the protracted drought conditions, and in light of the ongoing efforts of the humanitarian community to negotiate access and deliver aid to H2R areas given the severity of the needs in these locations.
Source: REACH Initiative