The country’s Minister of Women’s Development and Human Rights, Hanifa M. Ibrahim, said that through an innovative program with UNICEF, an information system was implemented to detect and support children in need.

After stressing the importance of this plan, the government official explained that many children are at risk of suffering violence and abuse due to the civil conflict in this territory, associated with climatic disturbances and extreme poverty.

She said that the program creates a database that will enable health professionals and social workers to ‘identify the child, record information and evaluate the case.’

For his part, the UNICEF representative in Somalia, Mohamed Ayoya, said that the adoption of innovative technologies offers an important opportunity to safeguard children in this nation, where Covid-19 cases have increased in recent months.

Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly called for shelter and refuge for extremely vulnerable children living on the streets in the country, many of whom are subjected to sexual abuse and other forms of mistreatment.

Somalia, an unstable country in the Horn of Africa and without a strong central government since 1991, is suffering from insecurity amid increasing attacks by the radical Islamist group Al-Shabab, against which the national army and troops of the African Union Mission in Somalia are fighting.

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