UNITED NATIONS
NATIONS UNIES
Office of the United Nations Resident & Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia
______________________________________________________________________________
Your Opinion Editorial of July 23 titled " Failure of UN agencies" (written by Ali Osman, ccusmaan@gmail.com) is unfair and is leading.

No one denies that the needs of the Somali people are immense and the situation across the country remains critical. However to suggest as your article does that no progress has been made does not reflect the huge efforts that have been and are being made by the United Nations together with our international and national partners.

In particular you point to “failures in the food, health and education sectors”. Please allow me to appraise you some the vital progress we have made in these areas over the
last year; the UN delivered 12 000 truckloads of food to over 3.2 million people across
Somalia last year. Even in Mogadishu, the location of some of the worst fighting, we are
still serving 80,000 cooked meals to hungry people every day.

Somalia’s education system is growing rapidly with support from UN. Last year enrolment in emergency schools increased by 40 per cent to more than 150,000.
Across the country 3700 teachers were trained and deployed to schools and the UN
supported the development of a national curriculum as well as the distribution of over
500 000 new textbooks for Somalia’s schoolchildren.

In the health sector last year the UN were able to vaccinate 1.2 million children and 1.4
million women against life threatening diseases. Hundreds of medical facilities have been rehabilitated and equipped with basic supplies. And medical staff have been trained and supported on study tours abroad to build in-country capacity.

The sad reality is that the needs of the Somali people are great and the resources available to us are finite. The situation is further complicated by the precarious security situation which prevents us from reaching people and the lack of capacity in many Government institutions.

We want to increase our assistance to the people of Somalia but we need all parties to the conflict to recognise the inherent impartiality and neutrality of the work we do for some of Somali’s most vulnerable communities. At the same time we continue to push to ensure that Somalia remains high on the international agenda so that we make greater progress in meeting the pressing needs of the Somali people.

Yours sincerely

ALEEM SIDDIQUE
UN Somalia, Spokesperson