IOM distributes aid to displaced families in Somaliland

GENEVA, Switzerland, March 22, 2013/African Press Organization (APO)/ – IOM has distributed 103 non-food relief item kits including clothes, kitchen utensils, shoes, and jerry cans to some 462 internally displaced people (IDPs) in the State House Park IDP camp in Hargeisa, the largest town in the Autonomous Republic of Somaliland.
The distribution follows a fire that destroyed a section of the camp earlier this month, leaving several hundred residents without shelter and in desperate need of basic humanitarian support.

The State House Park IDP camp, one of the six major IDP camps in the country, was established some 20 years ago by Somali returnees from refugee camps in Ethiopia and Somalia, following Somaliland’s Declaration of Independence in 1991 and the end of the inter-clan strife. It is now home to some 30,000 IDPs.

“These people have lost everything that they had,” said the Director General of Somaliland’s Ministry of Resettlement, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, Ali Mohamed Abdalla, who attended the distribution.

The distribution was funded by Japan and implemented in close collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Somaliland Red Crescent and Islamic Relief.

SOURCE

International Office of Migration (IOM)