Somali Women Are Trying to Stay Above Water

Dahabo Mahdi, 32, is ploughing a small cornfield she shares with her in-laws in Jiro, a village in central Somalia. She only moved there recently. She was forced to — unprecedented heavy rains in May 2020 had caused the Shabelle River to overflow its banks, flooding her city, Beledweyene, so badly that as many as 400,000 people had to flee through waist-high water.

While Dahabo has long worried about flooding, drought, and famine, now she also fears swarms of locusts. The insects wreak havoc on farmlands and are as deadly as a drought because of it. She is praying that calamity stays away this year so her family can produce enough food to stave off hunger.

Unfortunately, Dahabo is just one of an ever-increasing number of Somalis who have been displaced by extreme weather, flooding, and drought — in addition to conflict and violence — as climate change intensifies. The United Nations reported in May 2020 that, over the past decade, floods in Beledweyene specifically “have increased in magnitude and recurrence, reaching alarming levels by 2019, where 68 percent of the city was flooded.”

As of January, nearly 4 million Somalis were internally displaced. And among these homeless millions, perhaps unsurprisingly, women are suffering most of the burden.

“Already, many girls and women are poor and disenfranchised,” said Anders Thomsen, the UN Population Fund representative in Somalia. And when disaster comes, they are cut off from health services and face a higher risk of gender-based violence.

Moving in with her in-laws is not what Dahabo had envisioned for her life, but she is making the best of a tough situation. Her main priority is the safety and well-being of her seven children, aged 2 to 11, which means doing everything she can to make sure they get fed.

But even as she remains anxious about her situation, Dahabo is relieved that she has a support system to fall back on — others are not so lucky.

Intense poverty and political disenfranchisement

While we all face the implications of global warming, the vulnerable, marginalized and impoverished are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Overall, three-quarters of Somalis live below the poverty line. On top of that, at least 80 percent of people displaced by the climate crisis are women, according to the UN.

Gender inequality is a problem that goes hand in hand with climate change. And that means the crisis requires gender-specific responses.

“Gender-responsive climate and environmental action starts with ensuring women have equal access to productive resources, such as finance, land, water and clean energy,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Under-Secretary-General of the UN and director of UN Women, on World Environment Day, June 5. "It must also support women’s skills-building, advocacy, and access to technologies, with disaggregated data to inform planning and action.”

Part of the reason women suffer so much during natural disasters is because their needs are too often ignored at the political level. Women in less economically developed countries, like Somalia, lack the means and opportunities to pursue political positions, leading to government policies that do not put their interests at the forefront.

“Women are often not involved in the decisions made about the responses to climate change, so the money ends up going to the men rather than the women,” environmental scientist Diana Liverman told the BBC in 2018.

While Somali women are underrepresented in government, women’s rights activists and politicians are hoping to pass a bill that will reserve 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women in next year’s general election. Women currently hold 24 percent of the 329 seats in Somalia’s lower and upper Houses of Parliament, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, up from 14 percent previous in the previous election.

A country slowly drowning

The number of people displaced by floods in Somalia has increased dramatically in the last few years, from 281,000 in 2018 to 416,000 in 2019. In 2020, more than 650,000 people in Somalia were displaced by extreme flooding.

With much of the country heavily dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, the swamping of farms of corn or sesame has dire consequences.

Now-Acting President Mohamed Abdullahi told the UN General Assembly in 2019 that climate change had already hit Somalia, with seawater rising along Africa’s longest coastline, land degradation, long-term drought, and deforestation.

For Mako Mahdi, a 52-year-old farmer and grandmother, her farm is her only source of income. Like so many in Hirshabelle state, in the south-central of the country, her fields were destroyed by last year’s flooding.

Muslim Hands*, a UK-based charity, has been providing relief to Mako and Dahabo, and to many others who have been affected by drought and flooding. The organization’s disaster risk-reduction program is dedicated to helping communities prepare, mitigate, and recover from disasters — especially floods, locust swarms, and droughts. They teach residents to identify hazards and build flood-control infrastructure.

Mako, resilient, is not slowing down. She and her children and grandchildren work around the clock to maintain their plot of land and ensure they are ready to harvest during the only two possible windows each year: the Gu’ and Dayr rainy seasons. The Gu’ lasts from April to June, whereas the Dayr runs from October to December.

While Dahabo and Mako are facing the brunt of climate change as they work in their family fields, many women and girls throughout the country have ended up in camps, not knowing what the future will hold for them, dependent on others for food handouts.

Although Mako hardly gets any spare time for herself, she feels lucky to be able to farm her own land, and chooses to spend her one day a week off with her grandchildren. While work takes much of her time, she tries to be with them and play with them as much as she can.

To do so is a luxury, she said.

*The author is a program assistant at Muslim Hands.

Editor’s note: We have used first names in this article for Dahabo Mahdi and Mako Mahdi in order to avoid confusion.