Beyond family donors: building reliable emergency blood access in Somalia

•Dependence on family or replacement donors can make access to emergency transfusion reactive rather than reliably available at the point of care, a problem directly relevant to trauma, obstetric haemorrhage, and urgent surgery in resource-constrained African settings.•Somalia-specific evidence shows that family donors can dominate local blood supply and that emergency blood transfusion services remain limited across surveyed hospitals, making reliable blood access an important emergency-care systems issue.•The correspondence proposes a practical shift from patient-triggered donor mobilisation toward regular voluntary donation and system readiness, with lessons relevant to Somalia and other African settings facing constrained blood-service capacity.