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.
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.
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.”
