More and more people in the Horn of Africa countries affected by drought are leaving their homes to seek shelter in foreign refugee camps, particularly Somalis. The emergency is worsening and Italy is stepping up humanitarian aid. A few weeks after earmarking €2 million, the emergency programme for the refugees of Lower Shabele and the central regions of Galgadud and Mudug, who have found shelter in the Algoi camps in Mogadishu, has gone into action. This is what was communicated by the Nairobi Technical Unit coordinating the aid plan with the collaboration of 5 NGOs: Cosv, Cefa, Cesvi, Cospe and Grt. The number of direct recipients for the whole of 2011has been estimated at 217,000, and more than one million people will receive indirect assistance. The programme provides for a broad range of support for the supply of water and foodstuffs, plans for the protection of women and children and agricultural upgrade projects. Italian Cooperation sources describe the situation in Mogadishu as extremely serious. "The search for food is triggering an immense shifting of the population, with poor herders and farmers moving in toward the capital. Over recent weeks”, the same sources report, “the number of those who have made it to Mogadishu has reached 100,000, and these are people arriving in a very precarious state of health". Italy is carrying out various humanitarian initiatives in Somalia. The most important of these, just concluded in collaboration with other Western countries, involved €500,000 in funding for rebuilding the schools, hospitals and markets destroyed in the civil war. “This multilateral initiative”, the Cooperation underscored, “has given work to 50,000 Somalis”.