Perspectivas / Perspectives

 Famine menaces 20m people in Africa and Yemen ─ War, not drought, is the reason people are starving   

Panyijia/Maiduguri, Mar. 30.─ Outside a thatched hut in Panyijiar, in South Sudan, Nyakor Matoap, a 25-year-old woman, clutches the youngest of her three children. Dressed in a silky emerald shawl, she hides the baby, named Nyathol, underneath its folds. Her other children crowd happily enough around her legs. But the baby is in a bad way. Though almost a year old, he is scarcely larger than a newborn. When he cries, it is quiet and gasping, his tiny ribs pushing out his chest. His swollen head lolls uncomfortably on his emaciated frame. Asked whether he will survive, she replies simply, “I do not know.”

Before 2013 Mrs Matoap cultivated a patch of land near Leer, some 80km (50 miles) further north. But then civil war broke out in South Sudan, and her husband went to join rebel fighters. In August last year, government forces came into her village. They pulled the men out of their huts and shot them; the women fled. She found herself in the murky waters of the Sudd, a vast swamp which spreads either side of the White Nile. For seven months she has lived off wild fruit and the roots of water lilies. She last saw her husband in 2015, when her son was conceived. 

Khartoum, March 8, 2017 (SSNA) — The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) welcomed a recent contribution of £2 million (approximately US$2.5 million) to its programme from the Government of the United Kingdom to respond to the needs of South Sudanese refugees in Sudan.

UNHCR is using the funds to purchase non-food items, such as blankets, sleeping mats and cooking kits, which help refugees, cook and collect water for basic survival. The kits will be prepositioned and provided mainly to newly arriving South Sudanese refugees in White Nile and East Darfur states, as well as other areas, in coordination with Sudan’s Commission for Refugees (COR).

Since January 2017, over 35,000 South Sudanese refugees have arrived in Sudan surpassing the initial expectations of UNHCR and its partners.