Saving Lives in Times of Crisis

Bangladesh

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• Humanitarian assistance to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh provided a lifeline to hundreds of thousands who had fled across the border from neighbouring Myanmar. While conditions remain harsh for the nearly one million refugees living in camps around Cox’s Bazar, a measure of stability was achieved in 2018. WFP continues to provide electronic vouchers to refugees to enable them to buy food in shops. Child malnutrition almost halved year on year, and WFP engineers and logisticians helped prepare the camps to lessen the threat posed by monsoons to lives and infrastructure. After an initial emergency phase lasting more than one year, WFP’s response now includes longer-term needs in the camps.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

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• Food insecurity continued to grip DRC in 2018 as a result of decades of inter-ethnic conflict, insecurity, mass population displacement and extreme poverty. The number of people suffering from severe hunger doubled in 2018 to 13.1 million people, and WFP responded with an operational scale-up reaching a record 5.2 million people. However, large gaps between the needs in-country and available funding posed a serious challenge, while an Ebola epidemic further complicated the humanitarian situation.

Nigeria

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• Security, as well as the hunger situation, improved in Northeast Nigeria in the first half of 2018. WFP was able to reduce general food distributions and transition people to income-generating activities. But in late 2018, renewed clashes caused further misery and an increase in the number of displaced people, while jeopardizing the provision of aid. In addition to life-saving food assistance, WFP provides supplies to help refugees build their self-reliance, especially supporting environmentally-friendly livelihoods and projects focused on women.

Sahel

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• Economic challenges, climate variability and armed militancy combine to make the Sahel one of the world’s least stable regions. Its food-insecure population jumped to 5 million as the lean season struck early in 2018. WFP launched an operation across five countries to pre-emptively tackle what has become known as the “triple nexus”: the interdependency of humanitarian, development and peace-building efforts. Relief efforts were linked to programmes that engage local communities to harvest water for irrigation and restore degraded land, while also promoting health, education and livelihood outcomes.

South Sudan

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• Most of South Sudan’s short history as an independent nation has been mired in conflict. The violence – often extreme and unsparing of civilians – has kept the country at the bottom of the world’s GDP per capita leagues. While 2018 did not bring a repetition of the episodes of famine seen the year before, food insecurity remained all-pervasive. More than half of South Sudan’s population of 11 million were reliant on international aid for survival – but WFP made sure to use some of this assistance to help people shore up their resilience for the future. As needs continue, WFP has made every dollar go further by achieving efficiency gains of $50m in its supply chain by increasing overland and river transport.

Syria

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• After seven years of civil conflict, 2018 saw the government retake large parts of Syria regained from opposition groups. Military operations caused yet more displacement, with an estimated 12 million people scattered within and beyond the country’s borders. For most Syrians, life remained precarious at best. Stabilizing the nutritional situation of so many people across six countries, including in their own homeland, is enormously costly; the prospect of doing so when millions return will require long-term and sustainable levels of funding.

• Yemen

  

• Yemen’s ongoing internal conflict has left the country teetering on the edge of an abyss. Two major shocks hit the country in 2018 which increased the gravity of hunger in the country: the economy has been hollowed out due to a major currency devaluation, while hundreds of thousands of people were freshly displaced as fighting intensified in Hudaydah governorate. City markets may be well stocked, but the combination of spiralling prices, lack of livelihood opportunities, and unpaid wages for many civil servants meant that very few could afford to feed themselves. Of a population of 28 million, some 17 million – an extraordinary ratio – were hungry in 2018, which climbed to 20 million by the end of the year.