World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

In Somaliland, thousands more people are getting fresh meat as part of their diet as the direct result of WFP using vouchers. The vouchers are being provided as the family ration to households who have a malnourished child enrolled in the Targeted Supplementary Feeding Programme. Local traders are seeing the benefits we well as the money is ploughed back into their ecomony. Added to that, the number of children being brought for screening has risen, so it's a win-win stuation all round...

Families in the Somilaland region of northern Somalia are enjoying a more balanced diet thanks to food vouchers which they can use to shop for goods like camel and goat meat at the local market. By allowing them to buy directly from local traders, the project is also a boost for the region's economy.

The World Food Programme is committed to ensuring that vital food assistance reaches the hungry in Somalia.  We know that the vast majority of our food assistance reaches the hundreds of thousands  of hungry people who depend on it every day in Mogadishu.  Across Somalia, more than one million people rely on WFP food assistance each month.

WFP is reaching up to 1.3 million people with food relief in those parts of Somalia to which we have access. These include Puntland, Somaliland, central regions, Mogadishu and some border areas of the south. To assist the most vulnerable, WFP has increased its nutrition programmes using specialized products both to prevent and treat malnutrition in young children, pregnant women and nursing mothers. Nutrition programmes now make up some 63 percent of WFP's activities in Somalia.

After visiting a refugee camp in Somalia and a slum in the Kenyan capital, Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson has reaffirmed his determination to help WFP fight hunger in the region. The music artist has already committed to provide a billion meals for the hungry.

It isn't often that amidst the sadness and strife of a crisis, you meet someone who has lost a lot but who makes you laugh.  This is what happened to me in a small health clinic in the back of beyond in Fiqi Adan, Somaliland.

The droughts have been harsh for years and this left the family no choice but to change their lifestyle and abandon their pastoralist ways. For two children in Fiqi Adan Village, school means much more than receiving an education.

WFP staff in Somalia depend on generators for power, but poor-quality diesel fuel in the country can lead to frequent breakdowns. To tackle the problem, a WFP IT expert has devised a custom filtering system which protects the generator from impurities. Deployed across the country, the system has helped to provide aid workers with a more reliable source of power.

A visit to a centre where hot meals are served in Mogadishu reveals that, while many people displaced from the areas of crisis in the south are staying put for the moment, a few are thinking of returning to their home areas or have already gone. Tens of thousands of residents and displaced people receive WFP food cooked at these centres every day.

Communications Analyst, Mariko Hall, was in Nairobi recently as part of the flood of humanitarian workers arriving in the Horn of Africa to help with the hunger crisis. She was with WFP's crack emergency telecoms team FITTEST, which is always brought in to get vital communications systems in place fast. Sitting in a guest house where there's no power, she explains some of the challenges of setting up a COMCEN (Communications Centre) in emergency environments.