In this country which undergoes important floods for the fourth consecutive year, 71 % of the inhabitants need humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.
Le Monde
About 1.4 million children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition in South Sudan, a country facing its “worst hunger crisis”, especially because of successive floods and armed conflicts, estimated Friday, October 14, the NGO Save the Children. In the grip of violence of a politico-ethnicity and chronic instability since its independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan has undergone floods for the fourth consecutive year and these now affect nine of its ten states.
According to the United Nations, 8.9 million people, or 71 % of the population, need humanitarian aid. “This includes 1.4 million children under the age of 5 who suffer from malnutrition,” wrote Save the Children in a statement. “The situation has worsened in recent months, with more than 615,000 people affected by a fourth year of unprecedented floods, destroying housing, harvests, and causing an increase in cases of malaria and snake bites, especially among women and children “, according to the NGO.
The currency of this landlocked country in East Africa has lost 40 % of its value this year, resulting in an increase in prices of imported products, also pushed by the war in Ukraine, underlines the same source. “South Sudan is one of the five most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change,” said Jib Rabiltossaporn, director of Save the Children in South Sudan.
Upstream of COP27, which opens in November in Egypt, Save The Children urged the international community to “increase their financial commitments to help vulnerable communities and children to face […] climatic disasters” . According to the World Bank, 80 % of the 11 million inhabitants of South Sudan lived in a state of “extreme poverty” in 2018.