Mr. Dominic Crowley:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to it. I will cover some of the same ground that Mr. Healy has already covered so my apologies for that. As Ms McKenna has said, I am in Nairobi but I got in yesterday evening from Mogadishu. I want to talk a little about the situation in Mogadishu and in Baidoa. The time that I spent in Mogadishu and Baidoa gave me the opportunity to speak with our staff, with NGOs, both national and international, with the UN and with the minister for humanitarian aid for the state in which Baidoa lies.

The one message that everyone gave me is that this is the worst crisis in living memory. It is worse than the famine in 1992 when Mary Robinson famously made her visit. It is worse than the famine of 2016-17. Between them, those two famines killed between 500,000 and 600,000 people. It is unimaginable, as we have heard already, that we are facing another crisis of at least the same order of magnitude, not least because we have been shouting about the danger of this for the last 18 months.

I will speak about the things that I saw while I was in Mogadishu. I visited a stabilisation centre in Banadir Hospital, which is the national referral hospital for mothers and children. The ICU in the hospital would break your heart, with desperately emaciated children with multiple health complications as a result of acute malnutrition. The admissions into the unit have more than doubled in the last couple of months and are running at more than twice the number for the same period last year.

We are helping as much as we can. On the day after I visited, the slab was poured for a new unit that is being created. The unit will only accommodate 45 children. As the crisis deepens, which we all know it will, the capacity is inadequate for the level of need we will see.

I also visited one of our mother and child health, MCH, clinics in Mogadishu. They were so overloaded by the caseload in the last couple of months that we have had to open a second MCH clinic close by. The caseload is manageable but they are operating at very close to full capacity. The focus in these clinics is on children under five and pregnant and lactating mothers, looking at giving them nutritional and health support and at giving health education to the mothers. Standing inside the clinic, the youthfulness of the mothers was bluntly and brutally obvious. One of the common distress factors we see at the start of a crisis is that young girls are married off to take them out of a household and remove the burden of having to feed them. We saw that in Mogadishu and in the camps in Baidoa. Even our national staff are surprised at how young these women are who are giving birth.

The first time I was in Baidoa was almost exactly 30 years ago, when I responded to the 1992-93 famine. The situation is at least as bad now. There are approximately 500,000 people living in camps north and south of Baidoa. The population of the camps is greater than that of the town. When we talk about camps, these are not formal, structured centres. They are incredibly basic shelters of branches cut from trees and covered in sheets, blankets and, in some cases, tarpaulins. This is where people are living. Cooking is a couple of rocks outside with firewood put into them to try to cook on pots out in the open. Water is provided from tap stands like that depicted on the slide. Women and children queue to collect water in jerry cans. That is their water for the day.

The image on the current slide is one I stole from Voice of America. It depicts Baidoa camp. To the front is a big grey slab, which is the water bladder. That is what we fill at the start of each day. Once it is emptied, it is more or less gone for the day unless we can get more water to it, which is becoming increasingly difficult. Four wells out of hundreds dug in Baidoa in recent years remain operational.

We have had four failed rains. We are facing into the fifth rain failure. As Mr. Healy stated, 3 million livestock have died. The land has become so dry that no crops have been planted or harvested. Even if rain came, the soil is too hard for it to percolate effectively.

No discussion of Baidoa is complete without discussion of the role of al-Shabaab. The women with whom I spoke said one of the main reasons they fled their areas - and, as Mr. Healy said, people walked for seven to ten days to get to this set of camps - was they were afraid their children would be conscripted. The boys would be taken in to be al-Shabaab fighters and the young girls passed on as brides for older fighters. They said that even if the rains came, they could not go back because the threat to their children remained.

This is measles in the camps and an uncontrolled outbreak of measles will kill children very quickly. If we get rain in such unsanitary circumstances, we will, at the very least, get an increase in malaria and, in all likelihood, in serious waterborne diseases such as cholera. At the moment, aid to the camps is pitifully low. If people feel forced to migrate again, they will do so in a weakened state. It is questionable as to how many of them will survive the journey. Baidoa's nickname in Somali is "Baidoa Janaay". It is far from that at present.

I do not know if people have seen or read the report from Andrew Harding that came out a few days ago. It is well worth watching. It tells the story of the first of the two little red bundles on the bed shown on the current slide. It is a two-year-old boy. This is the story of his death. In the time before he died, he weighed 4.6 kg, not much more than a well-fed child at birth.

The issue of funding has been mentioned. The UN appeal has increased to $2.27 billion. This seems like a lot but, rationed out among the people who are supposed to received it, it equates to $440 per person. The appeal has received less than half, 47.3%, of the funding. This equates to $160 per person for the year, and that is to provide shelter, food, water and health. It is woefully inadequate for the level of need we face. It is no wonder the number of people in acute need of life-saving interventions is increasing dramatically, when we fail to provide the basics these people need. If there is a bright light in this situation - and it is difficult to find - it is that the US has been responsive and provided 67% of all funding made available to the humanitarian response plan of the UN. It is not the only funding mechanism, but it is the most important one. We welcome the recent commitment from Irish Aid to support the response in the Horn but far more engagement is needed from all donors if famine and further unnecessary deaths are to be averted.