The people facing drought and hunger aren’t passive victims, simply waiting for charities to save them. Families, especially women, make superhuman efforts to get by before they are finally forced to ask for help: meals reduced, new trades found, possessions sold, children dispersed, miles crossed.

My paternal grandmother in “the year of registration” walked dozens of miles through a desert painted red with the blood of goats, killed for their hides before they died and became worthless. She approached a relief center in Bulhar, with my father strapped to her back, only to be warned to return home, as an epidemic had spread through the camp. I don’t know how they both survived but they did.

In 2011 international donors were slow to respond and delivered aid after the majority of the 260,000 victims of famine had already perished. Today news of death from cholera or thirst even from areas without roads is shared on Somali social media within the day. Young Somali activists across the globe have created social media groups such as Caawi Walaal, Abaaraha and Somali Faces, who identify with the victims of the drought in a visceral, familial way.

Although they have been able to raise modest amounts of money, their network of local volunteers can reach remote places where the larger charities can’t. The young professionals behind Abaaraha used a Kenyan open source platform, Ushahidi, to gather real-time data from those affected by the drought and to coordinate Somali relief efforts.

Somalia is often described as a failed state, but famine is a symbol of failure in both a local and global community. The funds needed to prevent famine in Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan and Nigeria are far from being met by the international community, the United Nations’ Appeal for Somalia is reportedly under target by 57 percent and underfunding has already cost lives in all four countries. Contrary to humanitarian concerns, President Donald Trump’s administration is focused on military interventions in both Yemen and Somalia.

A few weeks back, at the London Conference on Somalia hosted by the British government, 40 countries sent their representatives. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary-General described the drought as Somalia’s “most pressing concern” but security and the intensifying war against the Shabab sucked most of the oxygen.

As Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, proceeds, people on the verge of starvation are turning their hunger to a spiritual cause. It opens up the question of how the richer Muslim countries will respond to the tragedy threatening their impoverished co-religionists.

In the late 1980s, at the beginning of the Somali civil war, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the first to send aid to refugee camps in eastern Ethiopia, but it came with strict instructions that young girls must be covered and the freedom of women restricted.

Perhaps, for this Ramadan, the Gulf countries can take the third pillar of Islam, charity, more seriously than they take hijabs and weapons purchases? In supporting those that have managed to survive this far we are honoring the sentiment found in both the Quran and the Talmud, “Whoever saves one life, is considered to have saved the whole of humanity.”