<div style="max-width: 700px;">
 <video-js data-account="1571595826001" data-player="c0AOssA7" data-video-id="6145181716001" data-embed="default" controls="" data-application-id="" class="vjs-fluid"></video-js></div>
<script src="//players.brightcove.net/1571595826001/c0AOssA7_default/index.min.js"> 
</script>
As South Africa enters day 1 of a national lock-down, many other Sub-Saharan African countries have also entered into partial lock-downs with the restriction of movement as a key element for curbing the number of infections. However, across the globe many people are already facing dire humanitarian emergencies and the World food programme is putting in measures to ensure that Sub-Saharan Africa has enough food to sustain itself during the Covid-19 pandemic. Joining CNBC Africa for more is Lola Castro, Regional Director for Southern Africa at the World Food Programme.

How COVID-19 impacts food security in SAA

How COVID-19 impacts food security in SSA

The U.N. World Food Programme is cutting food rations by 30 percent for more than 400,000 refugees living in camps in Kenya due to insufficient funding, it said on Monday.
Dadaab and Kakuma camps in Kenya are primarily home to refugees from neighboring Somalia and South Sudan, both ravaged by wars that have forced millions of people to flee.
The World Food Programme said it needed $28.5 million to cover the food assistance needs of the 420,000 refugees living in the camps for the next six months.
“An abrupt halt to food assistance would be devastating for the refugees, most of whom rely fully on WFP for their daily meals,” said Annalisa Conte, the top WFP official in Kenya.
The funding shortfall comes six months after the United Nations warned that the world was facing its greatest humanitarian disaster since World War Two because of the threat of famine in South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. It said in March that 20 million people risked starvation in what it called largely man-made hunger crises in addition to drought.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network said in a report last month that risk of famine persists in parts of Somalia due to the extended drought and disease outbreaks.
<div data-reactid="38"></div>
<div class="Attribution_attribution_o4ojT" data-reactid="39">
Reporting By Maggie Fick; Editing by Janet Lawrence
</div>

World Food Programme cuts rations for refugees in Kenya

Ed Cropley | MAIDUGURI
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has had to scale back plans for emergency feeding of 400,000 people in Boko Haram-hit northeast Nigeria due to funding shortfalls, a top U.N. official said on Wednesday.
The decision to cut aid for some believed to be on the brink of famine comes as the onset of the annual rains threaten to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis. Farmers have been unable to plant or harvest crops for years due to the Islamist insurgency.
&#8220;The plan was from the beginning to reach 1.8 million (people) this year but due to the funding constraints WFP has been forced to come up with a contingency plan,&#8221; said Peter Lundberg, the U.N.&#8217;s Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria.
The WFP is now focusing on supplying 1.4 million people deemed to be most at risk, with assistance for the remainder cut by around a third, Lundberg told Reuters in Maiduguri, capital of the hardest-hit state of Borno.
The U.N. says it needs $1.05 billion this year to deal with the crisis &#8211; one of three humanitarian emergencies unfolding in Africa &#8211; but has only received just over a quarter of that.
The reductions in Nigeria come a month after the WFP halved the monthly rations of more than 800,000 South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda because of a lack of funds.
MAROONED
More than 20,000 people are thought to have died and 2.7 million have been displaced in Boko Haram&#8217;s bloody eight-year battle to establish a medieval Islamic caliphate.
Two years ago, the group controlled an area the size of Belgium but a military push by Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger has ejected the militants from cities and major towns.
However, according to the latest U.N. assessments, huge swathes of land remain no-go zones, even with military escorts. As many as 700,000 people might still be trapped in these areas, Lundberg said.
The rainy season also makes it harder to bring in emergency supplies of food and medicine as dirt roads turn to rivers of mud for up to three months.
&#8220;Some of these places will be completely locked in because of the rain,&#8221; Lundberg said. &#8220;When the rain comes, we know there will be very big challenges.&#8221;
Furthermore, aid agencies have been prevented from building up large supply centres outside cities such as Maiduguri for fear they will be attacked.
In the town of Rann near the Cameroon border, nearly 50,000 people are about to become marooned with only two weeks&#8217; supply of food to hand, said Dana Krause, an emergency coordinator for the Swiss arm of the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
&#8220;The populations along the border are pretty much entirely dependent on external aid,&#8221; Krause said. &#8220;And by the end of July, Rann will literally be an island.&#8221;
As a last resort, a WFP spokeswoman said it was considering air drops for the most inaccessible areas.
Nigeria&#8217;s military did not respond to a request for comment.
(Editing by Susan Fenton)

Funds shortage forces UN to cut emergency food aid for 400,000 in Nigeria

ABUJA (Reuters) &#8211; The United Nations&#8217; World Food Programme could in a few weeks run out of funding to feed millions living on the brink of famine in Nigeria, four people familiar with the matter said, intensifying one of the world&#8217;s largest humanitarian crises. 
In the northeast, 4.7 million people, many of them refugees from the conflict with Islamist insurgency Boko Haram, need rations to survive, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), one of the main aid groups handing out food. Many of those living in camps for displaced people say they already barely get enough to eat. 
&#8220;With the money they have right now, and if they won&#8217;t cut rations, they can only go to May 18,&#8221; one person said, citing talks with the WFP, who asked to not be named because they were not authorised to speak to media. 
The WFP was &#8220;reasonably certain&#8221; it would get enough funding to last until late June, the person added. 
&#8220;All humanitarian crises globally are woefully underfunded and for WFP Nigeria is in one of the worst situations for funding,&#8221; a WFP spokeswoman said. 
&#8220;We are trying to save lives. We need over the next six months $207 million for Nigeria. At the moment the programme is 13 percent funded for 2017. It&#8217;s extremely low. Of the four countries facing famine it is the least funded.&#8221; 
The conflict with Islamist insurgency Boko Haram, which seeks to establish a caliphate in Nigeria&#8217;s northeast, began in 2009 and shows no sign of ending. It has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced more than two million. 
Nigeria&#8217;s northeast is now teetering on the brink of famine, aid organisations say, pointing to two years of missed crop harvests in what was once a breadbasket for the country, and the high likelihood of missing a third. 
The approaching rainy season increases the risk of disease spreading, especially within camps for the displaced, adding more stress to efforts to respond to the humanitarian crisis. 
The wet season also means tens of thousands of refugees are attempting to return home to farm, despite facing serious dangers, saying there is not enough food provided in the camps to sustain them.
CONTINGENCY PLAN
In a meeting on Monday with the WFP in Nigeria&#8217;s capital Abuja, donor countries and organisations, criticised the group for not having a satisfactory contingency plan if funding starts to dry up, two of the people with knowledge of the talks said.
The WFP spokeswoman said meetings with donors were genial, open and frank. 
&#8220;When we are funded and able to get out to the field we are getting to people. This crisis can be averted and we want people to understand this will work if it&#8217;s funded. We can avert the famine.&#8221; 
The U.S. Embassy in Abuja said the U.S. government was working &#8220;urgently and cooperatively with our partners in an effort to address the critical humanitarian needs in northeastern Nigeria&#8221;. 
&#8220;There is not adequate funding to sustain the global response to those needs here. Additional resources must be found urgently so that feeding does not stop,&#8221; the embassy said in emailed comments to Reuters. 
The WFP and donors have also locked horns over who is to blame for the lack of funding reaching the aid organisation, with the U.N. agency saying the money promised has not been released to them and donors arguing that basic paperwork still has not been submitted, the two people said. 
&#8220;There&#8217;s a dark cloud hanging over them that they&#8217;ll cut rations,&#8221; one person said. &#8220;It shouldn&#8217;t be this way.&#8221; 
The WFP, along with other groups, has come under fire in Nigeria for its slow reaction to the humanitarian crisis in the northeast, only launching a full-fledged response last year while other aid organisations had been in the country since at least 2014. 
On Wednesday, the U.N. children&#8217;s fund said its response to the crisis &#8220;remains severely underfunded&#8221;, a warning echoed by many other aid groups. 
The United Nations says it needs $1.5 billion in humanitarian aid this year for the Lake Chad region &#8211; which spreads across parts of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad &#8211; and $457 million had been pledged for 2017 by late February. 
Despite the Nigerian army saying the insurgency is on the run, large parts of the country&#8217;s northeast, particularly in Borno state, remain under threat from Boko Haram. Suicide bombings and gun attacks have increased in the region since the end of the rainy season late last year.
(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Susan Thomas)

WFP

How COVID-19 impacts food security in SSA

World Food Programme cuts rations for refugees in Kenya

Funds shortage forces UN to cut emergency food aid for 400,000 in Nigeria

With Nigeria’s northeast facing famine, WFP funds could dry up in weeks –sources

News Tips

Advertise With Us

WFP

How COVID-19 impacts food security in SSA

World Food Programme cuts rations for refugees in Kenya

Funds shortage forces UN to cut emergency food aid for 400,000 in Nigeria

With Nigeria’s northeast facing famine, WFP funds could dry up in weeks –sources

News Tips

Advertise With Us

Newsletters