Humanitarian health
Estimated drought-attributable mortality across Somalia by age and district, using household surveys, statistical models and scenario-based forecasts.
Drought-attributable mortality in Somalia
Drought-attributable mortality in Somalia
Overview
Somalia has had four recognised droughts since 2008. There is no complete civil registration system, so the number of people who die during a drought crisis has to be estimated. National estimates broken down by age, district and month have been rare.
My contribution
As a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2023, I built reproducible pipelines for the mortality estimates and contributed to an R package for humanitarian decision-makers. I co-authored the second report in the series and the paper in The Lancet Regional Health – Africa. The work was funded by the UNICEF East Africa office.
Selected outputs
The work produced estimates of death rates and excess deaths in Somalia by district and month, with scenario-based forecasts to help humanitarian teams plan their response. Assuming mortality before 2017 as the counterfactual, the paper estimates 71,100 excess deaths across Somalia during 2022 to 2024. Of these, 64,500 were among children under 5.