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After the rains in Somalia failed repeatedly between 2020 and 2023, the country was left facing a devastating drought. Then, in a pattern that is becoming all too common in the region as the world’s climate warms, returning rains the following year displaced three million people through flooding.
An huge increase in humanitarian assistance during the drought, with around $2bn raised in 2022 alone, helped the country avoid a catastrophic famine.
Now – before the country has been able to fully recover from the previous crisis – Somalia is once again facing drought and food insecurity. Two failed crop seasons last year resulted in harvests 45 per cent below-average yields, according to the World Food Programme, while a lack of rain this year has prompted serious alarm for the July-August harvest.
The big difference this time around, however, is that aid cuts mean that there is no guarantee the country’s humanitarian system will be able to plug the gap.
“In 2022 and 2023, the country was really on the brink of famine, and significant international resources were able to pull the country back from that,” says Juliet Moriku Balikowa, Oxfam country director for Somalia.
“What we are seeing now is that same pattern emerging again that we saw in 2022 and 2023, with rainfall far below the required level in parts of the country,” she adds. “But now funding cuts are already really limiting the ability of NGOs to respond.”
In the three months up to the end of June 2025, 4.6m Somalians are expected to face acute levels of food shortages.
The US, whose aid budget President Trump has decimated, provided around half of Somalia’s aid in recent years. With much of that money now out of the picture, some 60 per cent of NGOs operating in the country have already had to make cuts, according to the Somalia NGO Consortium. “Staff are being laid off, project offices are being closed across the country, and programmes are just being stopped in their tracks”, says Balikowa.
Minister of humanitarian and disaster management in Somalia’s southwest state, Abdinasir Abdi Arush, tells The Independent he is seeing similar patterns.
“The situation is really very worrisome, especially since the crop harvest for last year was already not ideal,” he says. “In the past weather patterns were reliable, but now it is a completely different world. Very low financial resources are reaching us through humanitarian agencies, we are really very worried about what is going to happen.”
Statistics from UN agencies operating in the country further illuminate the worrying picture.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a group that includes the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization, warned at the end of March that 4.6m people in Somalia will likely experience high levels of food insecurity between April and June 2025. That includes about 784,000 people in IPC Phase 4, which is the stage prior to famine.
OCHA, the UN agency that coordinates humanitarian responses in countries, estimates that of Somalia’s population of 19.3m, some 6m people are in need of humanitarian assistance in 2025. OCHA has designed a humanitarian response plan for the country worth $1.4bn for the year. So far this year, just 10 per cent of the plan or 143.4m, has been funded.
Files detailing USAID programme terminations that have been leaked by Congress, and analysed by The Independent, show projects worth more than $400m have been terminated in Somalia.
That includes funding for things like iMMAP, which used to provide vital mapping and coordination services for aid organisations including OCHA, as well as funding for huge aid contractors like DT Global and Dai Global, and humanitarian organisations like Mercy Corps and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
“Eight projects worth $45.6 million, most of which focused on humanitarian assistance, resilience building, displacement support, and migration management, have been stopped or suspended,” an IOM spokesperson told The Independent.
“These projects helped more than one million people across Somalia in 2024, providing water, shelter and protection, along with helping to build a fragile bridge toward Somalia’s recovery.”
One UN official based in the Somali capital Mogadishu told The Independent that the current estimate is that two million people will be directly affected by international aid cuts announced so far.
“There are health centres shutting down, bore holes that cannot be repaired,” the official said. “There were signals that donors might reduce some funding, but we never thought it would be like this. It really is so shocking.”
Alinur Ali Aden is the CEO of GREDO, a Mogadishu-based NGO established in 1992, whose 750 staff engage in humanitarian aid and developmental programmes across the country, covering everything from health to climate change adaptation.
“The USAID stop-work order has severely disrupted our projects, removing about one-third of our annual budget, and directly affecting over 1 million people who relied on our services,” he says.
“I can tell you that 90% of the people that we used to support no longer receive that support. We have tried to link projects up with other donors and organisations, but for the most part that has not been possible.”
Matters are made all the more concerning by a security situation in the country that is looking increasingly fragile.
Somalia has been in a state of civil war since a 1991 coup, and Al-Shabaab, the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, controls swathes of southern and central Somalia.
The group had been on the defensive in 2022 and 2023 after a military push from the federal government and its international partners, predominantly the US. But Al-Shabaab has been staging an offensive since March of this year, and has managed to seize key locations on either side of the capital Mogadishu. Violent incidents in the country, as monitored by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) NGO, have significantly increased in number in recent months.
Matters have been further complicated by the fact that African Union (AU)-led forces are supposed to be in the process of pulling out of the country. The international troops that remain in the country are under threat from the US Government’s refusal to guarantee financial support - with only 20% of military funding for the first half of this year met, according to reports - as well as squabbling between countries including Egypt and Ethiopia over who should play a greater role in peace-keeping.
One senior aid agency worker, who did not wish to be named, said that observers “cannot help but draw comparisons” with what happened to the governments in Afghanistan and Syria in 2022 and 2024: Countries whose governments appeared to hold control of the country from the capital, but whose authority turned out to be fragile, and able to be rapidly undermined.
“The African Union’s force level is already far too low to prevent an Al-Shabaab takeover of Mogadishu,” says Matt Bryden, strategic security consultant at Sahan Research, a think tank based in Nairobi.
“The lack of funding for the AU mission beyond June 2025 implies that it will either have to be drawn down further or terminated. There certainly appears to be no appetite amongst current donors to finance the federal government’s proposed surge of 8,000 additional troops.”
The AU pulling out would lead to most foreign diplomatic missions from Mogadishu to neighbouring countries, Bryden believes.
The federal government, meanwhile, is planning to hold the country’s first one-person, one-vote election in almost 60 years this year. The original plan was to hold district elections in June, state elections in November, and federal elections in May next year - though whether all those elections take place, and the extent of the country in which they occur, remains to be seen.
Constitutional reforms around the election have already caused further instability in certain areas, with the provinces of Puntland and Jubbaland both attempting to cut ties with the federal government in recent months, with state forces subsequently fighting with federal government troops.
In Somalia, experts stress that all crises - whether political or humanitarian, military- or climate-related - are linked. Malicious actors are then able to capitalise on the situation.
“Al-Shabaab reads this environment very well. The reason they launched their offensive in March is because they knew there was uncertainty about the future of the AU, and also about the federal government’s political agenda,” said the senior aid agency worker interviewed by The Independent who did not wish to be named.
When conflict flares up, it becomes increasingly difficult for aid agencies to reach unstable or dangerous areas, compounding problems created by droughts that are increasing in severity. Insecurity also causes more and more people to be displaced, which in turn increases the humanitarian requirements in the country - which are also looking harder to meet, as a result of aid cuts.
“Violence and climate are really a deadly nexus in this country, creating no end of problems,” says Oxfam’s Juliet Moriku Balikowa. “Now, with the aid cuts, things are becoming untenable.
“The stats coming out of the country are bad, but we expect them to get worse. It means that children will die, elderly people will die, and people with disabilities will die,” Balikowa continues.
“And when that happens, the social fabric that keeps communities together will break - and problems just keep getting worse.”
This story is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid series
English (US) ·