(CNN) -- More U.N. personnel will be sent to the war-ravaged Somalia after years of low staff levels in the troubled nation, a top official said on Tuesday.
Augustine P. Mahiga, the special envoy to Somalia for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said he expects the increased presence will help calm violence in the Horn of Africa country.
The U.N. Political Office for Somalia will beef up international and local staff in the semi-autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland, in Somalia's northern areas. But the personnel are still essentially off limits to the anarchic seaside capital, Mogadishu.
"(The UN) will crucially need to be in Mogadishu, although for security reasons we will have to take a cautious approach," he said in a statement.
"There is much work to be done interacting with the Somali government, AMISOM (the African Union peacekeeping mission), NGOs and other partners, as well as collecting information, administration and many other tasks that can only be done on the ground."
The United Nations currently has more than 60 international staff based inside Somalia, along with nearly 800 national staff. In recent years, U.N. personnel have suffered murders and kidnappings in Somalia, widely considered to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world for aid workers to operate.
Over the last 17 years, U.N. personnel assigned to Somalia have been based in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, because of persistent insecurity.
Southern Somalia is the worst part of the country in terms of security. Chronic warfare has plagued the region since 1991, when the government of Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown. Most of the country's most vulnerable people are in the south, according to Mahiga's statement.
Further, the U.N. Support Office for AMISOM has maintained an ongoing presence in Mogadishu to support the 6,100 African peacekeeping troops based there.
"The U.N. works hard to be as close to those suffering the effects of the conflict as possible," Mahiga concluded in the statement.
Somalia was ranked in 2010 as the worst failed state in the world, according to Foreign Policy magazine's annual index of such nations. Chad and Sudan, respectively, round out the top three failed states.
