Baidoa – On Saturday (04/08) more than 13,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) participated in an environmental clean-up campaign organized by IOM, the UN Migration Agency, in coordination with the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) outreach team in Baidoa, Somalia.

As part of efforts to bridge divisions and unite the diverse community groups to work toward the common goals of peace, development and reconciliation, the clean-up exercise focused on voluntarism among the IDPs and the host community.  

“Heaps of garbage covered the few available roads in the IDP sites. The lack of accessible roads greatly undermined social development and recovery efforts; however, with today’s clean up, accessibility to our sites will be easier,” said Adan Ahmed, an IDP leader in Baidoa.

IOM provided sanitation materials to 270 IDP sites for the clean-up exercise. The volunteers began their clean-up activities in the IDP sites, swarming over the narrow dirt lanes to remove large volumes of refuse that lay in front of residents’ shelters.

“I never had such a proud moment as when we cleaned our own houses and street,” said Habibo, one of the participants. “Today the streets are clean, our environment welcoming and our morale high.”

The environmental clean-up campaign in Baidoa is funded by the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO). To date, over 19,600 IDPs have benefited from the programme which IOM hopes to expand across the different sites in Baidoa.

For more information, please contact Hannah Curwen at IOM Somalia, Tel: 254 796 163 358 (Kenya), +252 612 470 027 (Somalia), Email: hcurwen@iom.int