00:00 payments for Somalia is to be temporarily suspended. The European Union's decision comes
00:05 after United Nations probe found widespread theft and misuse of support meant to avert famine.
00:11 Olivia Bizeau tells us more.
00:13 One of the conclusions of this report is that aid intended for Somalia's most vulnerable people
00:23 has instead been stolen by humanitarian workers, landowners and security officials. Now,
00:29 corruption is nothing new in Somalia and aid distribution has been a problem for decades.
00:34 It's been complicated by weak government institutions and widespread insecurity. In
00:40 2011, there were revelations of aid theft and after that humanitarian organizations converted
00:47 their way of giving aid and they shifted to cash-based transfers, meaning that they gave
00:52 the money directly to communities and individuals as opposed to going through the government. But
00:58 what this report shows is that even these cash-based transfers can be vulnerable to corruption. Now,
01:04 earlier I spoke to a Somali analyst called Hoden Ali and she told me that these cash-based transfers
01:11 are actually the most vulnerable to mismanagement. She said that we've just gone from one system of
01:17 mismanagement to another and she said that what needs to happen now is for these donors for the
01:22 government to be asking themselves some serious questions about where this money is going. Now,
01:27 last year, the European Commission donated $7 million to the World Food Programme's operations
01:35 in Somalia, but Hoden Ali said that the World Food Programme continues to be plagued by corruption
01:41 and poor practices. So, what needs to happen now is for the whole of the aid structure in Somalia
01:48 to shift. Now, every year, Somalia receives $2 billion of aid and most of that aid does not go
01:55 to the people who need it the most.
