Somalis Mourn as Veteran Medic and Human rights Champion Passes on at 73

Somalia’s foremost medical and humanitarian activist Hawa Abdi died in Mogadishu after a brief illness. Her family confirmed that she gave up the ghost on Wednesday.

Dr Hawa Abdi, famed for donating her backyard to treat thousands of displaced Somalis, is more popular through her work in the Hawa Abdi Foundation.

Dr Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe was a prominent Somali female human rights activist, founder and chairperson of the Dr Hawa Abdi Foundation and one of Somalia’s first female obstetricians.

She died on Tuesday morning, but the circumstances surrounding her death remain unestablished at the moment.

Dr Hawa Abdi was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Her work is credited for saving the lives of thousands during some of Somalia’s darkest moments. She cared for the wounded, the sick – often for free – at a hospital she established on her family’s land in 1983.

What began as a humble one-room operation would eventually care for close to 90,000 people during Somalia’s catastrophic drought in 2011.

When the civil war broke out in 1991, Dr Abdi’s grandmother implored her to stay behind and use her skills to assist the most vulnerable. She witnessed firsthand the devastation that occurred in Somalia early after the collapse of the government.

In 1971, she began her medical career as one of Somalia’s first female gynaecologists working in Mogadishu’s most prominent hospital.

Dr Hawa Abdi was born in Mogadishu in 1947 and attended local elementary, intermediate and secondary academies.
In 1964, she travelled to Kiev in Ukraine to study gynaecological medicine with the help of a Soviet scholarship.

She quickly recognised the lack of resources for a hospital birth outside the capital and decided, in 1983, to open her clinic known as the Rural Health Development Organisation (RHDO) in the outskirts of Mogadishu. She focused primarily on the treatment of women from non-urban areas.

For the Somalis, her death was a painful loss and albeit grieved, they are grateful for the kind of life she lived.