Dialo Koumba knew the violence spreading across her homeland would someday hit her village in western Burkina Faso. But when armed assailants killed her neighbours one night, she and her three co-wives ditched careful plans to sell their livestock before fleeing.
“Our departure was brutal,” recalls Kouma, 50, who has since joined her husband in northern Côte d’Ivoire.
Update June 27: Read new IPC report on Sudan here
At a tent settlement in the Chadian border town of Adre, Ahmat feeds blue cloth into his foot-powered sewing machine, as a popular folksong from his native Sudan plays in loops over a loudspeaker.
Famine has been confirmed in a camp sheltering hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Sudan’s North Darfur Region.
The declaration for Zamzam camp is a result of conflict, displacement and humanitarian access constraints.
Famine has been confirmed in Zamzam camp, which shelters hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Sudan’s North Darfur Region, as conflict, displacement and humanitarian-access constraints have devastating consequences.
Breaking: WFP Sudan latest
In the eastern city of Port Sudan, where tens of thousands of war-displaced seek shelter, frail infants with stick-thin arms chalk up dangerously high malnutrition levels. Hungry people pack schools and other makeshift housing centres, clinging to scant belongings from their old lives.
South Sudan is simultaneously drowning and drying as the climate crisis tightens its grip. An unprecedented flooding crisis has swallowed large swathes of the country while other parts are grappling with devastating drought.
More than 7 million people are food insecure, and 1.65 million children are malnourished.
The world’s youngest country has struggled to overcome a multitude of challenges. Conflict, climate shocks, a widespread economic crisis and the conflict in neighbouring Sudan continue to put sufficient, nutritious food out of reach for millions of families.
After coronavirus lockdowns and the economic blowback from the war in Ukraine, school meals have rebounded sharply and are today reaching a record number of young students worldwide. Yet even as many governments strengthen their commitments to school meals, some of the poorest are struggling to finance them.
Dawn is breaking. A woman is alone in her outdoor kitchen, oblivious to everything but the meal she’s cooking. Though this is a seemingly typical morning routine of a mother cooking for her family, it is not.
The Nobel Peace Prize gives WFP recognition “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict”.
