A total of $115 million is still needed to provide up to 5 million Yemenis with emergency food and nutritional assistance, according to the World Food Program.
The U.N. agency on Tuesday signed two agreements with Yemen’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation to deliver food, specialized nutritional support and cash to hungry households, internally displaced people, malnourished mothers and young children as well as refugees from the Horn of Africa.
According to an official statement, the first project is a $242 million year-long emergency operation that the agency launched at the beginning of the year, involving a total of 226,000 metric tons of food, including wheat, pulses, vegetable oil, sugar and a range of specialized, micronutrient-enriched products designed to either cure or prevent acute malnutrition.
The operation involves:
Delivering emergency food assistance to 3.5 million Yemenis and cash to another 400,000.
Giving out food assistance to 600,000 IDPs, some of which have returned to their homes while others are still affected by conflict.
Providing nutritional support to 405,000 children under 5 and 157,000 nursing mothers and pregnant women threatened by acute malnutrition.
The second project is a $8 million relief and recovery operation to provide food assistance to almost 70,000 refugees from conflicts or hardship in their home countries in the Horn of Africa, mainly Somalia.
More than 20,000 of these refugees are currently living at the isolated Kharaz camp outside the Yemeni capital of Aden and are surviving only on WFP rations.
The U.N. agency, however, stressed that full implementation of both projects still depends on funds from donors.
While the refugee program is almost fully financed, the emergency operation has only received $127 million of the $242 million needed from donors that include Japan, the United States, Canada, the European Commission, Germany and Finland.
Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.
About the author
Carlos Santamaria
Carlos is a former associate editor for breaking news in Devex's Manila-based news team. He joined Devex after a decade working for international wire services Reuters, AP, Xinhua, EFE ,and Philippine social news network Rappler in Madrid, Beijing, Manila, New York, and Bangkok. During that time, he also covered natural disasters on the ground in Myanmar and Japan.
