UNHCR concerned about malnutrition levels among new Somali refugees
GENEVA, July 5 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency is concerned about the high incidence of malnutrition among Somali refugees flowing into Ethiopia and Kenya amid a devastating drought in their conflict-racked country.
The relentless violence, compounded by drought, has forced more than 135,000 Somalis to flee so far this year. In June alone, 54,000 people fled across the two borders, three times the number of people who fled in May.
"UNHCR is particularly disturbed by unprecedented levels of malnutrition among the new arrivals – especially among refugee children," UNHCR's chief spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, said in Geneva on Tuesday. "More than 50 per cent of Somali children arriving in Ethiopia are seriously malnourished, while among those arriving to Kenya that rate is somewhat lower, but equally worrying – between 30 to 40 per cent," she added.
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Giving up your child to save her: a tale from Tunisia
Photo (c) Alexis Duclos/UNHCR
CHOUCHA CAMP, Tunisia, March 16 (UNHCR) – With smooth features and a calm way about him, Abdullah Omar, 25, comes across as someone accustomed to hard choices. But the decision to send his one-year-old daughter back to war-ravaged Somalia, because he could not afford to support her, was one of the hardest he and his wife Khadija have ever faced.
That was five months ago. "There is not a night that goes by when I don't lie awake thinking about my baby and worrying about her," Khadija told me here at the windswept Choucha transit camp just inside Tunisia.
For the young Somali couple it was the most challenging in a series of ordeals that they have endured in the four years since they fled Somalia – from a 10-day truck journey with people smugglers across the Sahara to serving time in detention and being hounded by racist thugs in Tripoli....
GENEVA, February 22 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency said in Geneva on Tuesday it has become "increasingly concerned" about the dangers for civilians inadvertently caught up in the mounting violence in Libya, especially asylum-seekers and refugees.
"We have no access at this time to the refugee community. Over the past months we have been trying to regularize our presence in Libya, and this has constrained our work," Melissa Fleming, UNHCR's chief spokesperson, told journalists in Geneva....