From Outbreak Response to System Resilience: Tropical Medicine in Somalia
Why specialists in tropical medicine and infectious diseases are central to Somalia’s health security, and how to build the workforce the country needs.
Key points
- One Health commitments are strong on paper but constrained in practice by conflict, displacement, antimicrobial resistance, weak institutions and fragmented financing.
- The perspective proposes a six-function framework: Understand, Protect, Connect, Detect, Adapt, and Recover & Build Resilience.
- Three immediate priorities: an essential integrated One Health service package, community-based and trade-safe surveillance, and financing One Health as a sustainable public good.
The implementation gap
This policy perspective examines how the One Health approach, which links human, animal and environmental health, can be made to work in fragile and conflict-affected settings across the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
Global and regional One Health commitments have strengthened. Yet implementation remains constrained by conflict, displacement, antimicrobial resistance, weakened institutions, fragmented financing and humanitarian pressure.
A six-function framework
The perspective organises One Health action into six practical functions:
- Understand
- Protect
- Connect
- Detect
- Adapt
- Recover and build resilience
Three priorities for now
- Protect an essential, integrated One Health service package.
- Develop community-based and trade-safe surveillance.
- Finance One Health as a sustainable public good.
Somalia as a regional case
Somalia is presented as an important regional case study. Recurrent droughts and floods that drive waterborne and zoonotic outbreaks, together with a large displaced population, make the links between human, animal and environmental health especially visible.
The perspective builds on his earlier work, including Building Resilient One Health Systems: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Somalia (2025) and Operationalising the One Health Approach in a Fragile State: A Framework for Sustainable Health Security in Somalia (2025).
Summary of the policy perspective From Resolution to Resilience: Making One Health Work in the Conflict-Affected Eastern Mediterranean. Related outputs are listed on the publications page.