Chad: Looming rains and lack of funding for humanitarian assistance threaten to leave Sudanese refugees without food and water

ROMA – The alarm comes from United Nations World Food Programme (WFP): Life-saving projects in Chad will grind to a halt within weeks without urgent funding. Meanwhile, thousands of Sudanese refugees continue to cross the border from Darfur every day and the arrival of the rainy season threatens to make a series of road accesses unusable for humanitarian deliveries in all the camps in the east of the country, where around one million of refugees found shelter and protection.

The lack of funding. WFP risks suspending activities in April, leaving 1.2 million people without water, food or health services. The cross-border road that connects Chad with Darfur, the only safe route that has allowed WFP humanitarian workers to assist people fleeing from August to today, turns into a flow of mud and debris with the rains, causing all of western Sudan remains even more isolated. Today the UN agency that deals with the distribution of food aid is working to transfer the necessary supplies to eastern Chad, in order to prevent, at least for a few weeks, the hardships caused by the rainy season. It’s a real race against time – the organization explains. We fight against the weather and against money. WFP has already had to scale back assistance operations for people on the brink of famine in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Dealing with emergencies. Since the outbreak of conflict in Sudan last year, the World Food Programme, like many other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations, has focused only on the emergency, immediate needs of people fleeing Sudan. But from April the organization will be forced to cut all aid for new refugees. For months now, refugees from Cameroon, the Central African Republic and Nigeria have not received assistance due to limited funding which has all been diverted to the Sudanese. But the cutting of food rations, among other side effects, fuels tensions between refugees coming from different places and the communities that welcome them because resources are increasingly scarce and become an object of contention.

The numbers of refugees in Chad. Ten months after the outbreak of conflict in Sudan, more than 559,000 Sudanese refugees and 150,000 Chadian returnees have entered the country, which is now home to more than a million people and has become home to one of the world’s largest and growing refugee populations. of all Africa. The problem is that Chad has also been facing an acute food crisis for five years, with levels of acute hunger which this year, in the lean season from June to August, will affect 2.9 million people. In February the government proclaimed a state of food emergency to underline the seriousness of the situation.

Trauma, hunger and stories of violence. Most refugees cross the border carrying with them the burden of trauma, hunger and histories of violence. They rely solely on humanitarian assistance to survive. Assessments conducted by WFP in the field show that food shortages are at worrying levels for 90 percent of new refugees and 77 percent of refugees already in the country. 40 percent of Sudanese children under five suffer from severe anemia. Cutting aid to people facing these levels of hunger and vulnerability, forcing them to skip meals and eat even less, is setting the stage for new crises and new waves of displacement.