Climate change, civil war in the south, a breakaway region in the north, hunger, internal displacement: these are just some of the issues facing Somalia.
Presenter Sean Moncrieff reports from the Horn of Africa in: Somalia: the complicated business of helping people.
The Newstalk host spent a week with aid agency workers and UN officials who describe the often frustratingly slow process of trying to help a country off its knees: not just through the provision of aid, but trying to convince parents of the benefits of education, of changing attitudes towards contraception and female genital mutilation and of establishing a democracy in the face of resistance from the all-powerful clans.
All this, along with the constant threat of suicide bomb attacks from the Islamist group Al-Shabaab. In Somalia, everything is complicated.