Boris Johnson today made a surprise visit to Somalia for talks with its new president over the African country’s drought “disaster”.
The Foreign Secretary met Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, who was elected last month, at the airport in the capi- tal Mogadishu.
Britain has appealed for emergency aid to help deal with Somalia’s drought, which has been declared a national disaster amid warnings of a full-blown famine.
The drought, which the United Nations said threatens about half of Somalia’s population — or roughly six million people — is part of a four-nation humanitarian crisis that the UN has described as the largest since the world body was formed in 1945.
Britain today announced it would match “pound for pound” the first £5 million donated by the public to the disasters emergency committee’s new East Africa crisis appeal.
The committee is a collection of 13 British aid agencies.
The UN’s humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien said after his own recent visit to Somalia that 2.9 million people there are at risk of famine and require immediate help “to save or sustain their lives”.
He has warned that close to one million children under the age of five will be “acutely malnourished” this year.
