More than 2 million Yemeni children under the age of 5 are expected to endure acute malnutrition in 2021, four United Nations agencies said on Friday. These agencies also urged stakeholders to end the years-long conflict that has brought the country to the brink of famine.
The U.N. report warned that nearly one in six of those kids — 400,000 of the 2.3 million — are at risk of death due to severe acute malnutrition this year, a significant increase from last year’s estimates. The report also said a lack of funds was hampering humanitarian programs in Yemen, as donor nations have failed to make good on their commitments.
“These numbers are yet another cry for help from Yemen, where each malnourished child also means a family struggling to survive,” said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, which jointly issued the report with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Unicef and the World Health Organisation (WHO). “The crisis in Yemen is a toxic mix of conflict, economic collapse and a severe shortage of funding,” Beasley explained. In 2020, humanitarian programmes in Yemen received only $1.9 billion of the required $3.4bn, the report said. UNICEF estimates that virtually all of Yemen’s 12m children require some sort of assistance. This can include food aid, health services, clean water, schooling and cash grants to help the poorest families scrape by. “But there is a solution to hunger, and that’s food and an end to the violence,” Beasley said.
“Malnourished children are more vulnerable to diseases . It is a vicious and often deadly cycle, but with relatively cheap and simple interventions, many lives can be saved,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Yemenis have suffered six years of bloodshed, destruction and humanitarian catastrophe. In 2014, the Iran-allied Houthi rebels seized the capital and much of the country’s north.
