SWALIM stands for Somalia Water and Land Information Management, and the name says it all; it is an information management unit serving Somali administrations, non-governmental organisations, development agencies and UN organisations engaged in assisting Somali communities whose lives depend directly on water and land resources.One and a half decades of civil strife in Somalia have resulted in the loss or damage of most of the water- and land-related information collected in the previous half century. By producing baseline information, assessing natural resources, searching for existing information sources around the world, SWALIM is recovering as much of lost data as possible. The project is also re-establishing data collection networks in collaboration with partner agencies, to facilitate better assessment of rainfall, river flow, groundwater resources, land characteristics, degradation and land suitability as well as improving flood warning and flood management.
According to a new report by the FAO-managed Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) and USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET), the number of people in need of emergency humanitarian assistance in Somalia has dropped from 4 million to 2.34 million, 31 percent of the population. At the height of the crisis, 750,000 people were at risk of death. “Long-awaited rains coupled with substantial agricultural inputs and the humanitarian response deployed in the last six months are the main reasons for this improvement,” FAO’s new Director-General José Graziano da Silva told a press conference in Nairobi after visiting southern Somalia.
