The UN World Food Programme, WFP, has warned that millions of people in West and Central Africa are facing record hunger as conflict, displacement, economic hardship, and repeated extreme weather push the region towards a major crisis.
At least 36 million people are struggling to meet their basic food needs, which is projected to rise to over 52 million during the lean season from June to August, latest analysis reveals.
This includes almost three million people facing emergency conditions, and 2,600 people in Mali who are at risk of catastrophic hunger.
Although needs are at a historic high, resources are limited, with millions of lives at stake.
“Without immediate funding, WFP will be forced to scale down even further both in the number of people reached and the size of food rations distributed,” Margot van der Velden, Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said.
In 2019, only four per cent of the population was food insecure compared to 30 per cent today, according to Ollo Sib, a senior research adviser with WFP.
“We hope that our voice will be heard because this food security situation in the Sahel remains extremely difficult and dire,” he said, speaking from Dakar to journalists in Geneva on Friday.
Sib recently travelled to some of the affected areas, such as communities in northern Ghana grappling with unprecedented drought.
“They were forced to replant two to three times, and for them, each failed sowing is an additional financial burden as the cost of fertilisers and seeds were extremely high in those locations,” he said.
The assessment team also went to northern Mali, which is the only place in the region where people are facing catastrophic food security conditions.
“We had the opportunity to interact with pastoralist elders who typically sell their livestock to buy cereals,” he said.
“This year they were worried because the cost of food rose by 50 per cent compared to the five-year average. But at the same time, they are not able to access markets to sell their goods.”
WFP said unyielding conflict is among the factors driving deepening hunger in West and Central Africa.
Fighting has displaced more than 10 million of the most vulnerable people across the region, including more than two million refugees and asylum seekers, in Chad, Cameroon, Mauritania and Niger.
Eight million more have been internally displaced, in Nigeria and Cameroon.
Meanwhile, food inflation exacerbated by rising food and fuel costs are pushing hunger levels to new highs.
At the same time, recurrent extreme weather “erodes the ability of families to feed themselves,” WFP said.
WFP stands ready to respond and scale up vital assistance in West Africa and the Sahel.
The UN agency is seeking $710 million to support its life-saving operations through the end of October.
The aim is to reach almost 12 million people this year with critical assistance.
So far, teams have already reached three million of the most vulnerable including refugees, internally displaced people, malnourished children under five, and pregnant or breastfeeding women and girls.
The agency said that five million risk losing assistance unless urgent funding is found.
WFP also called for governments and partners to invest in sustainable solutions aimed at building resilience and reducing long-term dependency on aid.
Since 2018, the UN agency has been working with regional governments to address the root causes of hunger through a programme that has rehabilitated over 300,000 hectares of land to support over four million people in more than 3,400 villages. The UN Central Emergency Response Fund has received two new allocations from the UN to support Congolese refugees in Uganda and efforts to combat a deadly cholera outbreak in Angola.
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UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, in a statement, said the funding was released on Friday.
At least 60,000 people have fled violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for neighbouring Uganda since January.
The first allocation, for $2.5 million, will allow the UN and partners to provide life-saving assistance to over 40,000 refugees, including clean drinking water, food, healthcare, and nutrition support.
The $1.8 million CERF contribution in Angola will support the urgent response to the country’s worst cholera outbreak in two decades.
Since the beginning of the year, the outbreak has spread to 17 out of 21 provinces, with more than 18,000 cases and 586 deaths reported as of 7 May.
The funding will go towards scaling up the response and helping to prevent further spread of the disease.
Similarly, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, said funding shortfalls had forced the humanitarian community to re-prioritise its response plan to alleviate the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC.
Seven million people have already been forcibly displaced by violence since advances by M23 rebels earlier this year.
While the 2025 UN humanitarian plan aims to provide life-saving interventions to 11 million people across the DRC at a cost of $2.5 billion, only $233 million has been received so far.
In spite escalating needs in the wake of the crisis in the east of the country, “that’s only half the amount we had secured by this time last year,” UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told journalists in New York on Friday.
Congolese health authorities are facing shortages of medical supplies as the DRC is now facing a cholera outbreak in six provinces.
OCHA is calling for greater protection of civilians in conflict-affected areas, and more support to prevent the collapse of essential services and address the root causes of the crisis.
NAN
