By Will Worley
SOMALIA is stuck in a “humanitarian trap”, with a generation of “undignifying” emergency relief leading to the “slow death” of the people receiving it.
Those are not the words of an aid-sceptic politician in a donor country, but those of Abdihakim Ainte, a top official working on climate change in Somalia’s government. Humanitarians have operated in the east African country for decades.
In a scathing interview with The New Humanitarian, Ainte slammed the “perpetual dependence” caused by humanitarian organizations in Somalia, and the money they spend without coordinating with the government – which is also fighting a civil conflict with al-Shabab militants.
Humanitarians in Somalia should change their “intents, approach, philosophy,” said Ainte, who was appointed as director of climate change and food security in the office of Somalia’s prime minister in April. “There has to be a paradigm shift… so that we don’t create this perpetual cycle of dependence.”
Ainte called for the billions a year in humanitarian aid spent in the country to be sent instead to government coffers to be used for longer-term development programming. But one Somali analyst warned that Ainte’s calls for a radical humanitarian overhaul in Somalia comes with the risk of “unimaginable suffering” and corruption in a country that has repeatedly endured conflicts, dire food insecurity, and environmental disasters.
Ainte’s remarks still echo a growing chorus of disaffection with traditional humanitarian approaches among Global South governments, communities affected by crises, and aid workers themselves – but senior officials are rarely as frank in their public criticism.
Decades of humanitarian response
Addressing Somalia’s humanitarian crises and focusing on development are among the key priorities of the government of Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre, along with security and fighting al-Shabab, according to Ainte. He described himself as a domestic coordinator of policy and the government’s international “interlocutor on climate and food security”.
Both issues are raw and immediate: After five failed rainy seasons, severe drought helped push nearly half the country, 8.25 million people, into need of humanitarian help in 2023. The UN-led response plan for Somalia estimated in January that 6.9 million people will need relief this year, with 4.8 million of them requiring nutritional assistance.
But Ainte is taking a much longer-term view of crises in his country. “We’ve been going through 30-plus years of recurrent humanitarian catastrophes, [which have] ended [livelihoods] but also created a permanent, vicious cycle on our people,” he said.
UN-led appeals that called for $100 million in 1996, for example, have regularly topped $1 billion since 2017.
Aid has become a “slippery slope” that has created a “dependency syndrome on the most vulnerable people”, said Ainte. This is most clearly seen in the estimated 3.9 million people who are internally displaced, many of them in camps – “the most indignifying, appalling condition that any human could suffer,” said Ainte.
Another example of aid dependency: Most humanitarian financing bypasses the government, Ainte said, going straight from donors to UN agencies and big NGOs. This deprives government institutions of the chance to develop – including their ability to deliver humanitarian services. He said the government has no say over how the money is spent, and the aid community actors are only accountable to themselves.
While Ainte said Somalia was “grateful” for the lives saved by humanitarian action, he said they were “for the short term not… long term. And that’s a problem”.
After disasters, everyone goes “back to their silos, and then we wait” for the next disaster, Ainte added. “That’s not sustainable.”
“We have to end this waiting game, it’s time for this… humanitarian money to be redirected and invested in more long-term, more resilient institutions that can withstand, [and] address whatever crisis occurs,” he said. “The humanitarian money should be redesigned… and invested into a development project… the money should go into the government account.”
Asked how the government would save lives and respond to another extreme drought like the one in 2023 without more humanitarian funding, Ainte suggested the situation would not have become so bad in the first place had there been more development spending, particularly in IDP camps.
“There are problems sometimes you have to prepare for yourself,” Ainte said. “Had our people had a better resilient infrastructure in place, we would have not asked [for] the amount of money we’re asking for… today.”
Drought worsens the situation for the most vulnerable Somali camps, said Ainte. A “better approach is to provide “sensible investments” like housing, infrastructure, and livelihoods “rather than keeping these people with a small leash of spoon-feeding and water-trucking.”
But Ainte’s call to steer donor funding from humanitarian actors to Somalia’s government was met with scorn by Mohamed Mubarak, executive director of Marqaati, a Mogadishu-based NGO focused on anti-corruption.
“The idea that humanitarian aid needs to be repurposed for development would be catastrophic to the millions of people that suffer from food insecurity and climate change-related shocks in Somalia,” Mubarak told The New Humanitarian. “The government has been trying to control all inflow of assistance into Somalia, and this sounds like another of said attempts.”
He added: “If the humanitarian systems fall into the hands of the government, rampant corruption and mismanagement will see unimaginable suffering in Somalia.”
Mubarak has previously written articles that give examples of this corruption but that also call for more long-term spending.
Ainte acknowledged that some agencies and donors are sceptical. “We need to do a lot in terms of our accountability, our transparency system,” he said. “But accountability has to be both ways. It cannot be a one-way street.”
Asked if he had taken his complaints to humanitarians working in Somalia, Ainte said a “candid” conversation was ongoing.
Development spending
So what would Ainte prefer instead?
He wants to see humanitarian funds go to development and resilience spending: water, agriculture, fisheries, climate resilience programmes, for example, spent through the government coffers.
Budget support is justified, Ainte said, because the government is responsible for what happens in Somalia, even if the conflict means it does not control all of the country’s territory. Ainte did not specify which institutions might work with the government to programme any redirected money, though he mentioned it could be done by UN agencies.
He praised the World Bank, whose International Development Association (IDA) has invested $2.3 billion in Somalia since 2020. This followed an extensive public debt restructuring and state reform programme, which the bank has recently been promoting as a development success story in places affected by fragility and conflict.
“With that money, we are making far more impact [than humanitarian aid],” said Ainte. “Creating jobs, building up government institutions and the civil service, and creating economic incentives for people.”
While international spending has often been focused on emergency relief in Somalia, some funding has also contributed to longer-term development.
Along with the World Bank, the World Food Programme and UNICEF are providing “direct support” to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs to implement Baxnaano, Somalia’s first social safety net programme. Other humanitarian agencies have also worked on the scheme. Key humanitarian donors have also funded longer term projects like the Somalia Stability Fund, a multi-donor fund that supports political and governance development.
But analysts have called on the international aid sector to take a different approach to how it works in Somalia, more in tandem with the government and local actors. “Somali capacities to respond to crisis have grown, and international aid needs to support those capacities more effectively,” researchers said in a 2023 paper published by Humanitarian Outcomes.
Ainte isn’t calling on humanitarian agencies to leave Somalia: He described them as “instrumental”, but said “they have to reorient their priorities and be aligned with the government.”
Maintaining the status quo will only exacerbate Somalia’s vulnerability, and keep costing donors billions of dollars in humanitarian appeals, Ainte said, adding: “This is simply unsustainable.”
Edited by Irwin Loy.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
