UN Raises Alarm over Humanitarian Crisis in Congo’s Kasai

Posted by African Examiner African News, East/Central Africa Thursday, November 2nd, 2017

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – An official from the United Nations’ World Food Program has issued a warning about the situation in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where conflict has left 3.2 million people severely hungry.

In the past year, about 1.4 million residents of Congo’s Kasai region have been displaced by violence that has killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed entire villages, according to Claude Jibidar, who heads the WFP in Congo.

Jibidar says the situation is comparable to well-known crisis zones like Syria and Yemen. Congo, the massive central African nation, now has the highest burden of displaced people in Africa.

“The number of people displaced during that time period is more than Syria, than Yemen, than all the other emergencies that you know of,” he said. “That just tells you about how serious the situation is in the DRC.”

The WFP is not the only humanitarian group calling attention to the Kasai region. Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders recently warned of widespread malnutrition among children, with rates of severe acute malnutrition as high as 10 percent in some areas.