LIBREVILLE, Gabon
The United Nation’s World Food
Programme on Tuesday warned lack of funds threatened to halt food and nutrition
assistance for more than a million people in Chad — including newly arrived
Sudanese refugees.Women who fled the war in Sudan await the distribution of international aid rations at the Ourang refugee camp, near Adre town in eastern Chad on August 15, 2023
The organization said funding
constraints emanating from a range of other crises including the wars in Gaza
and Ukraine meant its capacity to help was spread too thin.
It comes “as aid agencies
scramble to respond to a fresh wave of refugees fleeing an unimaginable
humanitarian crisis” in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, WFP said in a
statement.
“In just the last six months
of conflict in Sudan, as many refugees have fled into Chad as had crossed the
border in the preceding 20 years starting from the outbreak of the Darfur
crisis in 2003,” it added.
The organization said it
urgently needed some $200 million of funding.
“Dwindling funding and soaring immense humanitarian needs is forcing WFP into
making brutal choices,” it added in a stark assessment.
“In December, WFP will be
forced to suspend assistance to internally displaced people and refugees from
Nigeria, Central African Republic, and Cameroon due to insufficient funds.
“From January this suspension
will be extended to 1.4 million people across Chad — including new arrivals
from Sudan who will not receive food as they flee across the border.
“To ensure continued support
to crisis-affected populations in Chad over the next six months, WFP urgently
requires $185 million,” the organization said.
Even prior to the latest civil
conflict in Chad which broke out last April, the United Nations estimated the
country was hosting more than 400,000 refugees who had fled Darfur between 2003
and 2020, but that number has mushroomed to almost 900,000.
The WFP’s spokesperson for
western and central Africa, Djaounsede Madjiangar, branded the problem a
“forgotten crisis” aggravated by the world’s attention currently being largely
focused upon the conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
warned last Friday that Sudanese child refugees in Chad were suffering acute
malnutrition, the organization having treated some 14,000 since the turn of the
year with some 3,000 hospitalized.
The UN estimated that some
8,000 Sudanese entered Chad in the first week of this month alone fleeing the
latest wave of violence in Darfur, where conflict has displaced more than two
million. In Sudan as a whole, war has displaced more than 4.8 million people.
Sudan has since April been
torn by civil war between army chief and de facto head of state General Abdel
Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, leader of
the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
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