The Somalia Mortality Estimation Database (S-MED): a Bird’s Eye View of Mortality and its Determinants

Globally, there is a lack of consolidation and thus sharing of critical mortality estimates which can serve as an early warning of the severity of a humanitarian crisis. This lack of a comprehensive view may mask critical situations, and impact on which crises are more measured and visible to the humanitarian community. This ultimately affects the allocation of scarce humanitarian resources.

Somalia is a country marked by recurrent drought, armed conflict, food insecurity and malnutrition. To facilitate real-time investigation of mortality rates, we developed the open-source, publicly available Somalia Mortality Estimation Database (S-MED) to visualise mortality estimates from retrospective surveys and surveillance systems in Somalia in real-time. This enables improved awareness through visualization of mortality estimates as well as the capacity to facilitate multisectoral analysis of determinants of mortality (i.e., drought, displacement, disease outbreaks) and higher-level analysis (i.e., crisis-wide analysis of mortality estimates and mortality forecasting).

In this paper, we describe the mortality, morbidity, food insecurity, and environmental data contained in S-MED. We show how its mortality data can be used for improved detection of early warning signals and a more comprehensive public health interpretation of drought and armed conflict-driven health crises in 2018 and 2022. Similar mortality surveillance initiatives could be adapted to crisis-affected settings globally.