Drought and floods drove them from their homes. But hunger and poverty have followed them to a Mogadishu camp

Zeynab Ibrahim and her children outside their shelter in an IDP camp in Mogadishu's Kahda district. They have joined more than a million displaced people who now live in basic conditions in informal settlements around the city. Photograph: Nasir Bulle

For three years, Zeynab Ibrahim watched as her little town shrivelled up and died. The rains never came, the reservoirs were depleted and the farms gradually turned to dust. Hunger and sickness swept through the village, claiming the lives of many, including four of Ibrahim’s 10 children.

“We tried every means to survive – selling dried grass and digging up water from the barren earth. Unfortunately, there was nothing left, so we had no choice but to escape to save our children,” she says, sitting in front of her shelter in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in the Kahda district of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.