Emergency Lifesaving and Livelihoods Protection Project

Project Overview

Country

Somalia

Project name

ELLPP

Duration of the project

Start:	01.12.2022
End:	31.01.2024

Budget

CHF 1’100’000

Financed by

Project region

Topics

Background

Somalia continues to experience a severe drought due to lack of rain for more than two years. This threatens the food and nutrition security of millions of people. Nearly 6.7 million people face crisis and emergency food insecurity, with famine looming in some areas.

The present project targets Gedo Region, which borders Kenya and Ethiopia. As with other areas within the Horn of Africa, for many years Gedo Region has been facing challenges of extreme poverty, conflict, demographic pressure, environmental stress, weak institutions and infrastructure, and insufficient resilience to food crises.

Poor pastures due to the drought have notably decreased the availability of milk. Milk is an important component of the pastoralist diet and is consumed mainly by children, lactating and pregnant women, the elderly and the sick.

VSF-Suisse supports the most at-risk communities with unconditional cash transfers (UCT) to stabilize their household cash and purchasing power to enable them to access food from local markets.

VSF-Suisse also distributes fodder in form of range cubes to vulnerable households which saves their core breeding stock that enables them to rebuild their herds when the conditions start to improve.

In addition, emergency veterinary services are provided to treat sick animals and vaccinate healthy ones.

The goal

VSF-Suisse contributes to improved food and nutrition security for vulnerable drought affected communities in Somalia.

Specific goals are the following:

Vulnerable households have increased access to food through unconditional cash transfers and to milk through emergency feeding of core breeding goats
The main livelihoods assets of vulnerable pastoralist households are preserved through emergency veterinary services provision.