Somali community raises $250,000 to feed Gaza families through community kitchen project

‘We Know Hunger’: Somali Donors Keep a Gaza Kitchen Alive, One Pot at a Time

In the crowded lanes of Gaza, where fuel is scarce and days are measured by the arrival of bread, a line forms before noon. Children clutch metal bowls, women balance plastic containers, and an old man steadies himself on a cane as steam curls from vast metal pots. The kitchen—funded by Somalis thousands of miles away—has been serving up a rare constant amid the chaos: a hot meal.

For 50 days and counting, a grassroots Somali initiative has pushed past its own economic limits to keep that kitchen going. The campaign, led by the Somali Action Network and supported by Somalis at home and in the diaspora, has raised more than $250,000. Organizers say the operation spends about $5,000 a day on food bought inside Gaza, enough to feed 500 families daily at the start—later rising to 800 as prices softened.

A kitchen born of crisis

In Mogadishu this week, a small ceremony marked the milestone—50 days of meals. Videos shared from Gaza showed banners on cinderblock walls: “Somali People’s Campaign to Feed Gaza.” Another read, in big letters, “Thank You, Somali People.” The images made their way back to smartphones across Somalia, Dubai, Minneapolis, and London, the informal nerve center of Somali giving.

“When the crisis worsened, we added this feeding program,” said Sheikh Abdi Haye Sheikh Aden Hassan, who is helping oversee the effort, in an interview with the BBC Somali Service. “Our Palestinian brothers assessed the needs, and it came to $5,000 a day. That is how we sent the first funds, and the work began.”

The math was daunting. Somalia’s economy is fragile; unemployment is high. But the story moved quickly through mosque loudspeakers and WhatsApp groups. “At first we wondered how it was possible to raise $5,000 every day,” Sheikh Abdi Haye recalled. “But when people saw what was happening in Gaza, they responded. Palestinians told us Somalis understand hunger and hardship because we have lived through it.”

Buying local, cooking local

Unlike large aid convoys that often stall at borders, this initiative leans on networks already inside Gaza. Organizers send funds that are used to buy staples in local markets—where traders still manage to operate despite severe restrictions—and Palestinian clerics and volunteers run the cooking and distribution. The model isn’t new; it echoes the “cash-for-food” approaches favored by some humanitarian agencies, which argue that using local supply chains can be faster and more dignified than airlifts or shipments when markets are functioning at all.

“From Somalia’s own history of displacement, we know commerce never completely stops,” Sheikh Abdi Haye said. That insight has become logistics: lentils, rice, oil, and spices moving from small vendors to neighborhood kitchens; distribution lists handwritten and then photographed to donors; families counted, then fed.

A conversation across hardship

What gives a story like this its charge isn’t just the money or the number of meals. It’s the conversation between two communities that have known siege—one from war and famine, the other from relentless blockade. Somalis hear in Gaza’s plight an echo of their own past: the 1990s famine televised into world consciousness; the 2011 famine declared by the United Nations; the reliance on remittances from a far-flung diaspora to fill the gaps of a state still finding its footing.

The United Nations has warned of famine conditions in parts of Gaza. Against that backdrop, the Somali campaign’s daily routine reads like resistance in miniature: crowdfund by morning, pay vendors by midday, serve meals by afternoon, start again tomorrow. The work may not make headlines, yet it turns numbers into nourishment. And it answers a universal question: when the scale of a crisis is overwhelming, what does it mean to help anyway?

The work of many hands

Organizers say the kitchen began serving roughly 500 families a day. As prices eased slightly—an unexpected shift in a market warped by scarcity and conflict—they pushed that number toward 800. That change might seem small in a territory of more than two million people, but on the ground, each increment matters. A few sacks of rice, delivered on time, can mean the difference between children sleeping on a full stomach or not.

Somalis have a word for the informal networks that keep families stitched together across borders: qaraabo-kiil. It’s a web of obligations and affection—one cousin pays for a nephew’s school fees in Hargeisa; a sister in London sends rent for her parents in Garowe; and now, a group of donors in Minnesota and Mogadishu sends money to a kitchen in Gaza. Such systems may be invisible to those who measure aid in pallets, but they are the lifeblood of survival in places where international mechanisms fail or falter.

Digitizing compassion

This is also a story of technology enabling generosity. Somali networks rallied across Telegram channels, mobile money platforms, and crowd-funding pages. Where “aid” once meant big agencies and bigger budgets, it now also means nimble campaigns that build trust through transparency—videos of meals being ladled out, receipts from market purchases, and messages of thanks recorded in Arabic and Somali. Audiences expect proof; organizers provide it. The result is an accelerant for compassion, even in an era of donor fatigue.

Beyond headlines, a quiet ledger of gratitude

Gratitude has been one of the few abundant resources. “When someone helps you in a time of hardship, you never forget it,” said Sheikh Abdi Haye. “We hope this will be remembered by future generations of Somalis.” The exchange goes both ways: for Somali donors, Gaza’s thanks lands like a benediction. It says that their own lived experience—the memory of empty granaries and long lines at food distribution points—has ripened into empathy rather than despair.

As with any frontline humanitarian effort, the need still dwarfs the capacity. A kitchen can feed hundreds; it cannot end a blockade. A day’s donations can keep a flame lit; it cannot guarantee tomorrow’s firewood. Yet the continuity of small acts is a force of its own. Who among us hasn’t been kept afloat by a neighbor’s casserole after a funeral, a friend’s wire transfer on a bad month, a stranger’s kindness at a border? It’s the same logic, scaled to a crisis zone.

What this moment asks

Across the Global South, communities have learned to be each other’s safety nets when formal systems fray. The Somali Action Network’s kitchen in Gaza is one stitch in that wider fabric, a reminder that solidarity isn’t theory—it’s practiced in kitchens, markets, and mosques long before it reaches a press release.

It leaves us with a question worth carrying into our own lives: if those with little can organize to help those with less, what do the rest of us owe to communities in free fall? The answers may start small. A meal. A wire transfer. A promise to keep showing up, one pot at a time.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.