Being a child in Somalia can be hard – and thirteen year old Amal Ali Ibrahim’s story exemplifies that more than most. Having lost her mother at the tender age of three months, Amal has lived all her life with her father in Siliga internally displaced people’s (IDP) camp in Wadajir district.
Over one million people live in camps for displaced people in Somalia. Life there is difficult – especially for children – with limited access to protection and basic services, and a high risk of disease. Acute malnutrition rates in IDP camps are reported to be consistently above the World Health Organisation’s threshold of 15 percent. According to the UN 215,000 children under five in Somalia are acutely malnourished, with a further 40,000 severely malnourished.
ACUTE SOCIAL DEPRIVATION
With Amal’s father unemployed and her siblings unable to get work, the family’s vulnerability is intensified by dependence on relatives and neighbours for survival. Access to educational opportunities for Amal has been limited. While Somalia once had a comprehensive education system that provided free and inclusive education from Kindergarten right through to university, years of instability have devastated the education system. The country now has one of the world’s lowest enrolment rates for children of primary school age. It’s estimated that at least one million children between six and thirteen years of age are currently out of school, and that Somalia is on track to have one of the highest proportions of disenfranchised youth globally.
Every girl has a dream to graduate from a university and help her family.
These are Amal’s own words. But against this backdrop, achieving such an ambition might have seemed an impossibly uphill battle – until recently.
