1. Executive Summary
Famine conditions were still present in parts of southern Somalia when the 2012 humanitarian appeal for Somalia was launched in December 2011. On 3 February 2012, the famine was declared over, largely due to the delivery of aid under extremely difficult conditions and the exceptional harvest at the start of the year. With carry-over funding from 2011 and continued generous support in the months following the famine, humanitarian actors were able to build on the gains.
Throughout, 2012, humanitarians provided life-saving assistance and implemented programmes to strengthen people’s ability to cope with future drought. With the sustained assistance and relatively good rains, the humanitarian situation continued to improve. By January 2013, the number of people in crisis had been reduced to 1 million, down from 2 million six months earlier and 4 million at the height of the famine. But the situation remained fragile. In addition to the 1 million people unable to meet their basic needs without aid, a further 1.7 million who emerged from crisis in 2012 were at risk of falling back without support to build up their livelihoods. Nutrition rates have greatly improved but they are still among the highest in the world. Even as humanitarian actors were able to take advantage of improvements in security and a new federal government that signalled it will be more responsive to humanitarian needs, humanitarian access remained a major challenge through the end of 2012.
The Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) strategy was revised at mid-year to reflect the end of famine conditions and the increased focus on resilience programming. The funding appeal was also revised downward from US $1.5 billion to $1.1 billion in line with the humanitarian needs and an assessment of what humanitarians had the capacity to achieve in the second half of the year. The 2012 appeal was 52.5 per cent funded, with donors providing $479 million in new funds, as well as $134 million in carry-over funds from 2011. By comparison, the 2011 CAP received $868 million or 87 per cent of requirements. The vast majority of new funding in 2012 was received in the first six months of the year, unlike in 2011 when most funding came after famine was declared in July of that year. A higher percentage of overall humanitarian funding for Somalia was captured within the CAP in 2012 (77 per cent) compared to 2011 when it was 60 per cent. This highlights a steep reduction in funding outside the CAP. The Common Humanitarian Fund (CHF) was the sole source of pooled funding for humanitarian programmes in 2012. The CHF’s $89 million disbursed represented 14.5 per cent of the CAP funding received in 2012.
Funding performance for the eight humanitarian clusters and one enabling programme was uneven. The enabling programmes and logistics clusters received roughly 91 per cent and 78 per cent of requirements respectively. The food security cluster had $349 million available or 54 per cent of its requirement. The nutrition cluster was 48 per cent funded, while the protection, shelter and non-food items, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) clusters each received between 29 and 33 per cent of requirements. Clusters were nonetheless able to make substantial progress in implementing programmes and achieving target results. Factors that contributed to the success despite relatively low funding included some underreporting of funding, completion of activities planned for the previous year in 2012, and reporting by cluster members that received their funding outside of the CAP.
In line with targets associated with life-saving activities, humanitarians helped reduce global acute malnutrition (GAM) and severe acute malnutrition (SAM) rates to 14.3 per cent and 3 per cent, respectively, in areas where results could be measured. In the South where access restrictions made GAM and SAM reporting impossible, humanitarian actors successfully conducted interventions on a large-scale, including treatment for 388,000 acutely malnourished children. The food security cluster assisted 690,000 people per month on average with life-saving assistance and 1.2 million people in October. The numbers were below target chiefly due to access constraints, and to a lesser extent funding gaps. A lack of funding was the key reason that the target of distributing 1 million emergency assistance packages to internally displaced people fell short by a third.
In the second half of the year, access hampered implementation of food security programmes to provide livelihoods support, although over 800,000 people were reached on average per month in the first half of the year. Almost 1.4 million people received seasonal livelihood inputs, while 20 million animals were vaccinated in 2012. Clusters performed extremely well against their targets for providing an integrated package of basic services. Well over two million people gained access to primary or secondary healthcare, over 450,000 students benefitted from the distribution of supplies, nearly 50,000 families received transitional shelter, a quarter of whom moved into semi-permanent shelters. Over 2 million people gained sustainable access to safe water. With support from outside the CAP, the protection cluster reached well over 40,000 survivors of protection violations, including gender-based violence.