A pregnant mother walks nearly three kilometres through the outskirts of Mogadishu carrying her malnourished four-year-old child. She has not eaten for two days. Her last meal was plain rice. Five more children are waiting for her, and they too are hungry.
This is not an image from Somalia’s devastating famine of 2011. It is Somalia in August 2026.
Another hunger catastrophe is gathering strength across the country, but this time something particularly disturbing is happening. Just as the number of desperate families rises, the humanitarian machinery built to keep them alive is shrinking. Nutrition centres are closing. International funding is disappearing. Aid agencies are being forced to decide which children are sick enough to receive the limited assistance still available.
Nearly 1.9 million Somali children under five are projected to suffer acute malnutrition this year. Almost half a million could face severe acute malnutrition, its most dangerous form. Around six million people are confronting acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme, while drought, conflict, displacement and rising prices squeeze families from every direction.
Yet the WFP says it now has only around one-tenth of the resources it had during Somalia’s 2022 hunger emergency.
The tragedy is therefore no longer simply that Somalia is hungry. The terrifying reality is that Somalia is becoming hungrier at precisely the moment when much of the world appears to be turning away.
A mother who could not carry all her hungry children
The scale of Somalia’s crisis can easily disappear behind enormous statistics. Six million people. Nearly two million malnourished children. Hundreds of thousands requiring urgent treatment. But behind every number is a family making decisions that should be unimaginable.
At the Feynuus Health Center in Mogadishu’s Kahda district, women carrying babies wait beneath trees and crowd around a modest corrugated-metal facility. Many have been displaced from areas where drought and insecurity have destroyed what little stability their families once possessed.
Among them was Halima Mohamed Hassan, a pregnant mother of six.
According to the Associated Press, Hassan walked nearly three kilometres carrying her malnourished four-year-old. She herself had gone two days without eating. Her husband had died from malnutrition after the family struggled with shortages of food and water in Lower Shabelle, and growing insecurity eventually forced Hassan and her children to flee.
They walked for four nights before reaching a displacement camp outside Mogadishu.
Today Hassan shares a makeshift shelter with her widowed mother and her mother’s four other children. Twelve people depend largely on whatever the two women can earn washing clothes in nearby neighbourhoods.
Her other children are also malnourished.
Why didn’t she bring them to the nutrition centre?
She could not carry all of them.
Few sentences better describe what Somalia’s hunger emergency has become. Even reaching help requires physical strength, transport or money that some of the poorest families simply do not possess.
Once Hassan’s four-year-old received therapeutic food, she began walking back toward the camp.
Five hungry children were waiting.
She would have to bring them for treatment one at a time.
The numbers behind the catastrophe are getting worse
Hassan’s family is one household inside an emergency spreading across Somalia.
The World Food Programme estimates that six million people are facing acute food insecurity. The United Nations has warned that roughly 30 percent of Somalia’s population is confronting critical levels of food insecurity, while almost 1.9 million children under five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition during 2026.
Nearly half a million could require treatment for severe acute malnutrition.
UNICEF has reported another alarming development: admissions of children suffering severe acute malnutrition with medical complications have risen by 32 percent.
Those children are not simply thin or hungry. Severe acute malnutrition can leave a child’s body dangerously weakened and far less capable of surviving infections and other illnesses that a healthier child might overcome.
And just when demand for treatment is increasing, the places providing that treatment are disappearing.
UNICEF says 205 health and nutrition facilities have already closed following unprecedented reductions in humanitarian financing. As many as 618 facilities could eventually close nationwide.
That creates a brutal chain reaction.
A clinic closes. A mother must travel farther. The journey costs money or requires hours of walking. Treatment is delayed. A malnourished child becomes weaker. By the time the family reaches another facility, what might once have been treated relatively early has become a medical emergency.
At Feynuus alone, between 250 and 350 patients reportedly arrive every day, most of them displaced women and children.
Around ten nearby health and nutrition centres have already closed because funding disappeared, increasing the pressure on the facilities still functioning.
Aid workers have reported seeing children collapse because their families simply have too little food.
Somalia has experienced drought and hunger before. What makes 2026 particularly dangerous is that the country’s ability to respond is deteriorating at the same time as the emergency grows.
In 2022 the world found the money — this time it hasn’t
Perhaps the most disturbing comparison comes from the World Food Programme itself.
During Somalia’s severe 2022 hunger emergency, international donors mobilised enormous resources. Famine warnings generated worldwide attention, humanitarian organisations expanded operations and food assistance reached vulnerable communities.
According to WFP acting executive director Carl Skau, the agency had roughly ten times more resources then than it has available now.
That intervention mattered.
Somalia came frighteningly close to famine, but a massive humanitarian response helped prevent the worst-case scenario.
Four years later, the knowledge has not disappeared. The humanitarian infrastructure exists. Aid organisations know which communities are vulnerable. Nutrition specialists understand how to treat severely malnourished children. Somalia’s previous emergencies have provided painful experience in identifying famine before it reaches its most catastrophic stage.
What is missing is money.
International humanitarian budgets have been squeezed as major donors reduce assistance and resources are redirected toward crises elsewhere. The United States has halted some funding, while other Western countries have also cut humanitarian spending. Médecins Sans Frontières said earlier this month that financing to address acute malnutrition in parts of Somalia had fallen by more than 80 percent this year.
Meanwhile, emergencies across the Middle East and elsewhere compete for the world’s attention and increasingly limited humanitarian budgets.
This creates an uncomfortable reality.
Somalia’s children are not starving because humanity does not understand how to feed them.
They are starving while a system capable of helping them is being forced to retreat.
The WFP says it is increasingly limited to doing the bare minimum, concentrating scarce nutrition supplies on children suffering the most severe conditions.
But hunger does not wait for budgets to improve.
Every moderately malnourished child denied early assistance risks becoming tomorrow’s severely malnourished child.
Drought, war and soaring prices are creating a perfect storm
Funding cuts alone did not create Somalia’s emergency.
The deeper problem is that several pressures are hitting vulnerable communities simultaneously.
Drought has again devastated parts of the country. Crops have failed or produced less. Livestock-dependent families have watched animals weaken or die. Water becomes harder and more expensive to obtain. Families that once survived through farming or pastoralism are pushed toward towns and displacement camps.
Conflict compounds everything.
Somalia continues to fight the al-Shabaab insurgency after two decades of violence. Insecurity restricts movement, disrupts markets, displaces communities and makes humanitarian operations dramatically more expensive.
Where roads are too dangerous, aid agencies sometimes have to transport staff and supplies by aircraft. Other communities become extremely difficult or impossible to reach.
A bag of food delivered to a secure city by road is one thing. Getting assistance into isolated communities surrounded by insecurity is another.
Then there are prices.
The war involving Iran and continuing instability across the wider Middle East have added pressure to fuel and agricultural costs. Somalia is particularly vulnerable to external price shocks because so much of what the country consumes depends directly or indirectly on imports.
More expensive fuel means more expensive transportation. More expensive fertiliser increases pressure on agricultural production. Higher shipping and food costs eventually reach ordinary families who were already spending much of their income simply trying to eat.
For a wealthy household, a modest increase in the price of rice or cooking oil is an inconvenience.
For a mother who has not eaten for two days so her children can have something, it can become the difference between eating and going hungry.
This is how famine develops: not necessarily through one dramatic event, but through layer after layer of pressure until families exhaust every remaining option.
Sell an animal.
Borrow money.
Reduce meals.
Remove children from school.
Move somewhere else.
Depend on relatives.
Walk to a displacement camp.
And eventually there is nothing left to sell, nowhere else to go and nobody remaining who can help.
Somalia cannot live permanently at the mercy of foreign aid
The immediate priority is obvious. Somalia urgently needs humanitarian financing, food assistance and functioning nutrition centres. Children facing severe acute malnutrition cannot wait for long-term development strategies while governments debate what Somalia should look like in 2035.
They need food now.
But another question cannot be avoided.
How many times must the Horn of Africa repeat this cycle?
Drought arrives. Crops fail. Livestock die. International organisations issue warnings. Television cameras eventually arrive. Donors organise emergency funding. Famine is narrowly prevented or thousands die. Rain eventually returns, global attention moves elsewhere, funding disappears — and everyone waits for the next drought.
This cannot be considered a permanent development model.
Somalia’s crisis should also be a warning to the entire Horn of Africa that food security must increasingly become a regional strategic priority rather than something outsourced indefinitely to foreign humanitarian organisations.
Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Djibouti and their neighbours possess different resources and different strengths. Ethiopia has enormous agricultural potential and a huge domestic market. Somalia and Somaliland have extensive coastlines, livestock industries and access to some of the world’s most important maritime routes. Regional ports can connect agricultural production with international markets. Shared investment in roads, storage, irrigation, electricity, water infrastructure and cross-border trade could gradually build resilience that emergency food deliveries can never provide.
Political disagreements will continue. Questions of sovereignty, recognition, borders and governance will not disappear overnight. But hungry children cannot eat political arguments.
The Horn trades too little with itself, coordinates too little during emergencies and remains too vulnerable to decisions made thousands of kilometres away.
When Washington, Brussels or another donor capital changes priorities, a nutrition centre in Somalia should not suddenly have to close.
That is not genuine food security.
The Horn needs warehouses and water, not another cycle of emergency appeals
Imagine a different regional response.
Strategic grain reserves positioned around the Horn could release food rapidly when drought strikes. Better roads could move Ethiopian agricultural surpluses toward Somali markets and ports. Expanded irrigation and water-storage projects could reduce dependence on increasingly unpredictable rainfall. Regional electricity networks could support irrigation, refrigeration and food processing.
Modern livestock corridors and veterinary cooperation could protect pastoral communities whose herds routinely cross political borders that animals and drought do not recognise.
Ports in Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti could become part of an integrated regional food-security network rather than simply gateways for imported goods.
None of this would eliminate drought.
But drought does not automatically have to mean starvation.
Many parts of the world experience drought without millions of children approaching malnutrition because infrastructure, markets, government capacity, insurance systems and emergency reserves absorb the shock.
The Horn needs to build that capacity.
International donors should remain partners in that process. Wealthier countries cannot suddenly withdraw humanitarian assistance from populations already standing at the edge of disaster and pretend that development will somehow replace emergency food tomorrow.
But there is an enormous difference between partnership and permanent dependency.
Somalia’s current emergency demonstrates how dangerous dependency can become. In 2022, the international community found the resources necessary to mount a huge response. In 2026, the same institutions confront another severe emergency with dramatically less money.
The children are still there.
The drought is still there.
The need has not fallen by 90 percent simply because the funding did.
What happens when there is nowhere left to walk?
At the end of all these statistics, meetings, funding appeals and geopolitical calculations, we return to one woman walking through Mogadishu.
Halima Mohamed Hassan carried one hungry child to a nutrition centre because she could not physically carry the others.
After receiving help for that child, she walked home again.
Tomorrow there will be another mother.
Another child will be weighed.
Another family will arrive after travelling for hours.
But increasingly, the clinic they are walking toward may no longer be open.
That is what makes Somalia’s 2026 hunger emergency so dangerous. The country is not merely confronting another drought. It is confronting drought while humanitarian capacity contracts, international attention shifts elsewhere, food and fuel become more expensive, conflict continues and hundreds of health facilities face closure.
Emergency funding must return before today’s severe food insecurity becomes tomorrow’s famine.
Yet Somalia and the wider Horn must also draw a harder lesson from this crisis. A region of more than 150 million people cannot indefinitely depend on whether distant governments happen to feel generous when the rains fail.
The Horn has agricultural land, ports, livestock, rivers, entrepreneurs, young workers and enormous untapped economic potential. What it lacks is enough integration to turn those individual advantages into collective security.
Today a Somali mother walks kilometres carrying a starving child because the nearest functioning nutrition centre may be her family’s final hope.
If another 600 health facilities disappear, the terrifying question is no longer how far these mothers will have to walk.
It is what happens when there is nowhere left to walk?