Jowhar

Jowhar Wildlife Reserve is one of nine wildlife reserves listed for Somalia in the UN List of Protected Areas, which records it as designated but gives no year of designation, no area and no IUCN category.^[1] The nearby town of Jowhar is the administrative centre of the Middle Shabelle region and the capital of Hirshabelle state, about 90 km along a major road north of Mogadishu.^[2]

Somalia as a whole is credited with over 177 mammal species, and the Nile crocodile is described as very common in southern Somalia.^[3]

The town of Jowhar lies on the Shebelle River, which rises in the Ethiopian Highlands.^[4]

The Shebelle is subject to frequent flash floods: a flood in October 1999 in Ethiopia's Kelafo and Mustahil districts left about 70,000 people in need of assistance, and some locals considered the April 2005 flood the worst in 40 years.^[4]

Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, established the agricultural settlement Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi at the nearby town of Jowhar in 1920, raising funds for dams, roads, a railway, schools, hospitals, a church and a mosque, and that by 1926 the colony had grown to 16 villages with about 3,000 Somali and 200 Italian inhabitants.^[2] Under a 2004 agreement Jowhar and Baidoa were designated joint administrative capitals of the Transitional Federal Government; President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed relocated to Jowhar in July 2005, though the leadership had moved to Baidoa by February 2006.^[2]

The UN List of Protected Areas records no year of designation for the reserve.^[1] Eleven wildlife areas have been declared in Somalia since the 1970s, but only two were thought to be functional, and no formal protection has been offered to any of them since the early 1990s.^[5]

The town of Jowhar lies about 90 km along a major road north of Mogadishu.^[2]

Nature Somalia states that no protected areas remained functional after the 1991 collapse of the central government.^[6]