Lifesaving Assistance to disaster Affected Communities in Baidoa - Somalia Despite a favorable Deyr (October- December) rainy season, the lingering effects of the drought in 2018/2019, and flooding an estimated 1.3 million people in Somalia will be in Crisis (IPC Phase3) through mid-2020 without sustained humanitarian assistance. Currently, 4 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, out of whom 2.9 million are Stressed (IPC Phase 2) and 1.1 million are facing Crisis or worse. Among the most vulnerable are 2.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who remain highly impoverished. According to IOM, October 2019 report, Baidoa, the capital of Bay region, hosts one of the largest IDP populations in Somalia. According to figures compiled by the international community, as of September 2019, Baidoa had 359,994 internally displaced persons, consisting of 51,322 households on 435 sites.

Therefore, looking into this precarious situation, the proposed project is designed to respond to the immediate lifesaving and life sustaining basic needs of poor and vulnerable displacement affected communities in Bay region. Project proposes three rounds of Multipurpose cash transfers to the most vulnerable displacement affected communities. Moreover, project will also provide cereal crops and vegetable seeds to displacement affected communities living in the off camp area. At the same time this we understand that as a result of locust infestation, beneficiaries pastoral and agro-pastoral communities are forced to migrate to other areas, therefore under this program NRC will be providing Fodder vouchers to the migrating communities. Support in the form of fodder vouchers will help communities to purchase fodder for their livestock during the time of migration. This cash injection will help benefiting households in accessing food and other unmet needs on immediate basis from the accessible markets. The monthly cash transfer amount will be as per the cash and market working group recommended transfer rate which will help beneficiaries to meet 80% of the full minimum expenditure basket. As a result of cash injection, affected households will have improved access to the diversified food and will positively contribute to the nutritional outcomes. 

Proposed project is in line with the Food Security cluster strategic response objectives SO1: Improve households’ immediate access to food through provision of conditional and unconditional cash assistance depending on the severity of food insecurity phases, vulnerability and seasonality of the livelihoods.

As soon as beneficiaries identification and  registration will be completed, NRC will be conducting a Baseline survey in order to have baseline values. After baseline, registered beneficiaries will be released monthly multipurpose cash transfer in line to the cash and market recommended transfer rates using electronic services of Harmuud. NRC team will be collecting post distribution monitoring (PDM) data two weeks after release of each round of cash transfer. As a standard practice, PDM captures some of the key information around timeliness of support, progress against critical indicators including ‘Food consumption score (FCS) and Household dietary diversity score’. PDM also monitors expenditure patterns of the provided support and determines measures for corrective actions if there are deviations from objective.