Somalia: MSF calls for malnutrition treatment to be restored as children reach hospital too late
Children with severe malnutrition face growing risks as local nutrition services disappear.
Children are arriving at hospital in critical condition as healthcare and nutrition services across the Mudug region in central Somalia continue to close. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is now calling on donors, UN agencies and health authorities to restore and scale up nutrition treatment at primary healthcare level across the region.
Malnutrition surge overwhelms ward
The MSF-supported inpatient malnutrition ward at Mudug regional hospital in Galkayo has 28 beds. Since early April 2026, it has been running beyond capacity with almost twice that number of children being treated in late May. Between January and July, MSF admitted 1,389 children for inpatient treatment of acute malnutrition and medical complications, 809 of them severely malnourished. Between May and July, 1,322 children were admitted to outpatient malnutrition treatment, compared with 788 over the same three months in 2025 — an increase of nearly 60 per cent.
“They are arriving late because there was nothing left closer to home. An inpatient ward is the last step in a chain. It cannot replace the rest of it and it is already full.”
Emmanuel Omale, MSF project coordinator in Somalia
The caregivers of most of these children have already sought care somewhere else first. Of eleven children newly admitted over one week in June, 10 had already attended a health facility closer to home. Their caregivers brought them to the MSF-supported hospital because there was no medication or therapeutic milk or because their child was not getting better.
Sabrin Ahmed travelled 12 hours by car from Abudwak — around 270 kilometres away — after a physician in a local hospital told her he could not treat her 11-month-old and after she learned that the therapeutic milk the child needed was out of stock in the town.
“By the time these children reach us, they are not only malnourished, they have pneumonia or measles or diphtheria on top of it, which is much harder to treat and increases the risk of death,” says Emmanuel Omale, MSF project coordinator in Somalia. “They are not arriving late because their families waited, they are arriving late because there was nothing left closer to home. An inpatient ward is the last step in a chain. It cannot replace the rest of it and it is already full.”
Funding cuts leave children without timely nutrition treatment
Somalia’s humanitarian response plan was reduced to $1.18 billion for 2026 and was still less than one third funded by July, according to UNOCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme has cut emergency food assistance from more than two million people to just over 600,000 and more than 70 health facilities in Puntland, one of Somalia’s federal member states, which covers the northern part of Mudug region have closed. Rainfall has been substantially below average across Mudug through 2026, and pastoral families have moved in search of water and pasture, taking them further from facilities that are still functioning.
MSF calls on donors, UN agencies and health authorities to restore and scale up nutrition treatment at primary healthcare level across Mudug. That means functioning inpatient and outpatient treatment for acute malnutrition close to where families live and uninterrupted supplies of ready-to-use therapeutic food and essential medicines. Children treated early for acute malnutrition, in their own district, can avoid getting sicker and the need for a hospital bed.
MSF will continue to admit and treat every acutely malnourished child who reaches Mudug regional hospital and will keep looking for ways to add capacity. But an emergency ward is no substitute for a health system. Severely sick children arriving now are the result of access to care that has already been lost.
