By Clár Ní Chonghaile in Gargara
Hassan Haji Towakal has lived in one of the world’s toughest environments for 80 years. He has seen many droughts, but the recent prolonged lack of rainfall is the worst he has experienced in Somaliland, the breakaway country situated in Somalia’s relatively peaceful northern corner.
The drought, which has left roughly 240,000 people without enough food and killed between 35% to 40% of Somaliland’s precious livestock, has also made Haji Towakal question the future of pastoralism – the only life he has known.
“I do not have livestock now. The drought is still here … I am struggling but I don’t have any answers. People were always busy herding livestock. They would come to the town to buy and sell, but now they are not in a good shape,” he said.
Wearing a black waistcoat and clutching a blue and white walking stick, he sits on a plastic chair in the village of Gargara, a cluster of flimsy shelters fashioned from branches and sticks, and a few low stone buildings.
Gargara is about a three-hour drive on bone-jangling tracks from the capital, Hargeisa, but it might be on another planet.
Hargeisa is a sprawling mix of pastel coloured, one-storey shops, new estates of smart bungalows, and busy green stands where men cluster to buy the mild stimulant khat as goats and camels wander by. Gargara has wells – which is why about 1,000 people have come here over the past five years – but little else.
Somaliland is a textbook example of how tackling climate change and attaining sustainable development – as defined by the global goals adopted in New York this September – are two sides of the same coin.
Caught as it is in the political tailwind of efforts to end the crisis in Somalia, where al-Shabaab militants are still fighting African peacekeepers and the government, the country is still struggling for international recognition. But in rural areas, the state is barely real even to its own people.
Only about one-third of the population has access to safe drinking water. Life expectancy in the country, which has a population of approximately 3.5 million people, is just 53 years for men and 56 for women. Across Somalia as a whole, only about 33% of people have access to electricity.
The World Bank has estimated that gross domestic product for Somaliland was $1.4bn (£930m) in 2012, giving the country GDP per capita of just $347. That makes Somalilanders the fourth poorest people in the world, just ahead of the populations of Malawi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi. Somaliland relies mainly on livestock exports and remittances from overseas. Foreign investors are still wary because of the unresolved political situation.
Conversations with pastoralists in Gargara and other nearby villages make it clear that drought places an unbearable burden on people who already tick all the humanitarian needs boxes.
“Water is a basic need for humans and every living thing. It is something that is general and personal. All communities need it, whether it comes from shallow wells or any water assistance,” Haji Towakal says.
Read more: Somaliland stricken by drought: ‘We need what all humans need’
Source: The Guardian
