y M.A. Egge

The Education Minister Hon. Prof. Farah Mohamud Elmi has asked Marodijeh regional educationist to pep up their services and at the same time file evaluation reports constantly as concerns the educational standards.

In a meeting that the minister held yesterday with the headmasters of the schools within the region, the minister put emphasis on the need of making sure that basic and inter-mediate levels of the primary education be re-vitalized hence perpetually to be aptly standardized.

The scores of head teachers who talked to the media after the meeting could not hide their overwhelming enthusiasm in keeping their part of the bargain.

“We pledge the pepping up of over services”, they said, going by quote in local reports.

Mr. Abdirashid Duale, Group CEO of Dahabshiil companies meets with top US officials on challenges that need to be removed to effect a smooth flow of  remittances benefiting Somalis.

Mr. Duale, among others, met with the Treasury Department, members of the House of Representatives, the World Bank and went all the way to the White House to highlight the importance of remittances to Somalis’ livelihood touching all facets of all of their personal, professional commercial, educational and health sectors.

Mr. Duale pointed out that the meetings he held with these officials bore fruit. “My impression was that everyone was sympathetic to the issue and that they were trying to find a solution to the current challenges. Clearly more work needs to be done to realise a lasting, meaningful”, he said. solution.

“My impression was that everyone was sympathetic to the issue and that they were trying to find a solution to the current challenges. Clearly more work needs to be done to realise a lasting, meaningful solution”, he said.

Mr. Duale revealed that Dahabshiil was sending remittances from the US as usual and that the only difficulty currently facing the industry there was the issue of the US banks and the recent Kenyan move to close almost all remittance companies operating in that country without a legal due process – or warning.

“The issue is being discussed with the Kenyan authorities, and we are hopeful that the rule of law will prevail at the end of the day. Dahabshiil is fully licensed in Kenya and there is no indication anywhere that our services have been knowingly used ‘illegally’ at any time – not there, not anywhere else,” Mr. Duale said.

Group CEO gave interviews to the VOA English, Kiswahili and Somali services in which he presented the case of Somali remittances and the ongoing efforts to ease the stranglehold some countries such as Kenya are trying to put on an indispensable Somali lifeline.

Following the attack by the Islamic militant group al-Shabab on the Garissa University in northern Kenya, where over 140 students were killed, the government suspended the license of Dahabshiil Money Transfer Company and another 12 companies. To tell us more about what impact this is having on their business, VOA’s Vincent Makori is joined by Abdirashid Duale, Chief Executive Officer of Dahabshiil.

To define the impact the closure will have on the business and on beneficiaries, Abdirashid Duale, Chief Executive Officer of Dahabshiil.,  joined VOA’s Vincent Makori.

Following the closure, Abdirashid told the VOA, Dahabshiil lawyers in Kenya immediately wrote to the Inspector General and shared all relevant documents with that office including, but limited to, how Dahabshiil operates globally in a network spanning over 126 countries 40 of which were African, and how Dahabshiil was fully compliant with all the financial laws regulating money matters in all of the host countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSKXckf9qB0

By Goth Mohamed Goth

Somaliland Army units were on Wednesday deployed to quell deadly fighting which broke out on Tuesday between the two warring clans in Taleeh district which is situted 180 KM south of Las Anod.

Mr. Abdirashid Hersi Dalmar,the deputy governor of Sool region said, “The security forces were deployed in the area to deter further violence and also stop elements whose action was bent on reigniting fresh bloody inter-clan fighting between the two communities who have been staying in peace.

“We must defeat those bend on starting inter-communal violence by showing a lot of restrains” he appealed to residents of Taleeh.

The skirmishes between the two warring clans broke out on Tuesday evening but tensions are still running high.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgbkK00X4a0&feature=youtu.be

‘It is driving people crazy,’ says one of hundreds arriving across the Gulf of Aden in Berbera. ‘The air raids are destroying more houses than the fighting’

It was just after midnight when the livestock ship carrying nearly 200 people fleeing Yemen’s civil war docked at the port in the Somaliland city of Berbera.

As aid workers set up registration tables in the light of Red Crescent ambulance headlights, the migrants slowly filed on to land across a plank the size of a door. Families sat in circles on the gravel, attending to crying children or staring blankly at the stacks of cargo containers surrounding them. They looked dazed and exhausted, but they were happy to be alive.

This was the fourth – and most crowded – shipload of refugees fleeing Yemen to reach Berbera since late March, when a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began a bombing campaign against Shia Houthi rebels who forced President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi into exile.

It is an exodus that seems unlikely to end any time soon, despite Saudi Arabia’s announcement on Tuesday night that it had ended its bombing campaign. Saudi warplanes launched new air strikes against rebel positions in Aden and Taez on Wednesday and aid workers have warned that the humanitarian situation in Yemen remains “catastrophic” after months of fighting.

International airports such as the one in Sana’a have been demolished, and fleeing overland is risky as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula continues to control swaths of territory in the east.

So far more than 2,000 people have made the journey across the Gulf of Aden to the coast of Somaliland, and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, expects that over the next six months as many as 100,000 more will follow.

“The reason people are coming here is because of the planes,” said Mohammed, 21, one of the boat’s passengers. “It is driving people crazy. The air raids are destroying more houses than the fighting.”

Another man pulled out his mobile phone and showed pictures of the destruction. One showed the body of a man lying on the street – charred beyond recognition except for its leg, which was just a stretch of clean white bone.

The current flow of refugees reverses an earlier migration across the Gulf of Aden which began in the late 1980s when civil war forced hundreds of thousands to flee Somalia.

Of the 246,000 refugees registered in Yemen, nearly 95% are Somali. Now many of these are trying to return home, some even making their way to Somalia’s capital city, Mogadishu, despite continuing attacks by the militant group al-Shabaab.

Somaliland – a self-declared independent state which is viewed by the international community as a territory within Somalia – has largely escaped civil war violence, but is not currently equipped to receive large numbers of refugees.

The new arrivals were accommodated in a warehouse where they described a Yemen that is sinking further into crisis every day. Food, water and electricity shortages are crippling humanitarian camps and major cities like Sana’a. Families are living in basements beneath their levelled houses, unable to purchase petrol, which this group says has reached $100 for 20 litres in some places, to escape to humanitarian camps.

Within the medical facilities that haven’t been reduced to rubble, people are dying because of a lack of necessary medicine. One young woman raised her voice in anger as she explained that more aid organisations appeared to be leaving Yemen than trying to get in.

Many had spent the last of their savings to pay the $100 passage for the journey from the port of Mocha and across the Gulf of Aden. “All my money is finished here,” said Miriam, 20, who had travelled alone.

UNHCR has said it will begin coordinating travel to Mogadishu and other locations as more migrants show up. For now, though, migrants must fend for themselves to find a way out of their temporary stay in Berbera, where reception facilities have yet to be completed.

The local government and aid organizations plan to expand their assistance as more refugees arrive. UNHCR has put in place additional toilets and improved access to water, to replace the single, dirty bathroom behind the warehouse.

Still, those like 14-year-old Safwan Hasan, who is accompanied by every member of his family, are happy to make a new home out of the old one they fled so many years ago.

“All the people [on the boat] were happy,” he said, “because they were coming to their second country.”

Source:Guardian