The dramatic spike in the number of hungry people comes at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading into fragile countries in a region home to the weakest health systems anywhere in the world.
Burkina Faso - which has seen the largest number of officially-reported deaths from COVID-19 anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – is where the number of food insecure is expected to more than triple to
The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection.
In January 2016, WFP Nigeria started remote phone-based data collection and food security monitoring using the mobile Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (mVAM) approach to conduct household surveys and key informant/trader surveys.
The R4 Rural Resilience Initiative (R4) is a strategic partnership between Oxfam America (OA) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP). R4 was initiated in 2011 to respond to the challenges faced by food-insecure communities enduring increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters and other shocks.
In Lao PDR, 44 percent of children under 5 years of age are stunted as a result of a poor diet, often lacking in essential micronutrients, fats and proteins as well as experiencing recurrent illness.
WFP began delivering cash assistance to an initial group of Kampala-based refugees on 5 June. Thanks to this contribution, WFP can continue rolling out assistance in coming weeks.
No one could have predicted that the crisis in Syria would last this long. Iman is a woman from Daraa, in southwestern Syria, who remembers when her people resolved their differences peacefully.
With her head bent and one arm clutching her baby girl, Iman sits brooding over a broken past and an uncertain future.