Save the Children Announces $28.5M Support for Countries Worst Hit by Hunger

By Soko Directory Team / Published July 5, 2022 | 11:56 am

KEY POINTS

Save the Children is prioritizing providing critical support to 19 countries where extreme hunger threatens to claim thousands of children’s lives and futures over the next few months.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

“A purely responsive system will not be able to prepare or respond to challenges in future years. Together, with governments, donors, partners, and communities, we must change the course of this global crisis to create a safe, happy and healthy world for our children, free from harm and hunger.”

Save the Children has announced an urgent injection of funding worth US$28.5 million to 19 countries to help families facing the worst global hunger crisis in decades.

The support follows the extreme measures households have resorted to as a means of survival. These desperate measures include drinking from cattle troughs, eating putrid meat, and fighting off wild animals for food.

Gabriella Waaijman, Save the Children’s Humanitarian Director, noted that the worst global food crisis in decades is putting millions of children’s lives on the line and action is needed now.

“The combined impact of conflicts, climate change, COVID, and the cost of inflating food prices due to the conflict in Ukraine crisis has left up to 750,000 people facing famine. A further 49 million people could soon follow unless they received immediate support. Failure to act now will prove catastrophic and could cost thousands of lives,” said Waaijman.

Figures show that the number of people going hungry daily has doubled to 276 million from 135 million in the past two years, and now up to 750,000 people are facing famine in five countries as drought collides with conflict and COVID-19.

The war in Ukraine has disrupted the global food system by sending wheat prices and sunflower oil rocketing, exacerbating severe hunger crises in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen to the Sahel region of Western Africa, with Save the Children staff seeing more and more children with life-threatening malnutrition.

The Horn of Africa has been crippled by drought after four consecutive failed rainy seasons. Approximately 18.4 million people are facing acute food insecurity, raising fears about a repeat of 2011 when a lack of intervention led to famine in Somalia that killed 260,00 people, half of whom were children under 5.

In parts of northern Kenya, the only water available to some families is from animal troughs spreading debilitating illnesses like diarrhoea through communities and severely impacting children.

Save the Children staff working in eastern Ethiopia reported increased encroachments into communities by starving wild animals, with monkeys attacking women and children they think may be carrying food or water and warthogs coming into homes.

Reports of children suffering from malnutrition in Somalia are increasing rapidly, with 1.5 million children expected to be facing acute malnutrition by the end of the year, including 386,400 who are likely to be severely malnourished.

“Huge progress has been made in recent decades to reduce global hunger. Countries on the frontline of the climate crisis have become increasingly resilient – new and innovative methods of managing the risk of cyclical crises, like drought, have been successful. But all countries have a limit, and this has been exceeded for many. Progress is now being reversed,” Waaijman said.

Save the Children is prioritizing providing critical support to 19 countries where extreme hunger threatens to claim thousands of children’s lives and futures over the next few months.

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These countries are Afghanistan, Myanmar, DRC, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

The organization is already providing food, cash, livelihood support, and critical health and nutrition services to stop children from going hungry, either now or in the future.

Save the Children also works with partners to help communities spot early warning signs for hunger drivers, so they can take the necessary steps to protect themselves and mitigate against the worst impacts.

Mthulisi Dube, a nutritionist, currently working with Save the Children’s Emergency Health Unit in Turkana in Northern Kenya, said at least 229,000 children across northern Kenya are severely acutely malnourished with their lives as risk.

“There is illness everywhere, linked to hunger and thirst. I’ve heard that in some communities, the situation is so bad that after their animals starve to death, people have had to eat the putrid meat because they have no other option for food,” said Dube.

Dube added that the children drink from drying riverbeds and wells usually reserved for livestock.

“They are coming down with diarrhoea, which is worsening their dehydration. It’s a vicious cycle. We are also finding it harder and harder to treat unwell children because families are continually on the move. We have been moving our health posts to the most remote hubs, far from major towns, where herding communities normally know where to find us, but they are five steps ahead of us –walking, looking for food and water,” he said.

In the meantime, an already critical humanitarian situation in South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, has been further compounded by the third consecutive years of severe flooding. This has left an estimated 63 per cent of the population – of 7.7 million– facing high levels of acute food insecurity.

In Afghanistan, 9.6 million children are hungry every day due to a dire combination of economic collapse, the impacts of the war in Ukraine and an ongoing drought, the latest figures show.

“A purely responsive system will not be able to prepare or respond to challenges in future years. Together, with governments, donors, partners, and communities, we must change the course of this global crisis to create a safe, happy and healthy world for our children, free from harm and hunger,” concluded Waaijman.

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