In view of the UN pledging conference for Yemen to be held in June, on 26 May, the WFP alerted the international community on the critical aid situation in Yemen, underlining how humanitarian projects are at risk and their interruption would put many lives in danger. This announcement was followed by a statement issued on Thursday by the heads of 17 international humanitarian organizations which stressed that programmes currently running in the country might not be enabled to continue until the end of the year.
This would be particularly critical as the 80% of the Yemeni population rely on humanitarian aid. The country is devastated by a conflict between the Hadi’s government and the Houthi rebels which lasts since late 2014. Even before the war raged, Yemen was in a desperate situation due to widespread poverty that made it one of the poorest countries in the world. Currently, the country has 10 million people acutely food insecure and 3.5 million internally displaced people, returnees, refugees and asylum seekers. Therefore, the COVID pandemic adds up to an extremely fragile situation, where the healthcare system already collapsed and if operations continue to be underfunded, the pandemic will have a major disruptive impact on the Yemeni unstable situation.
In lights of this, the UN pledging conference for Yemen will be of the uttermost importance to address the situation. As Jens Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared: “It is very, very critical that the international community steps up now and at the pledging conference on the 2nd of June, because we are heading towards a fiscal cliff. If we do not get the money coming in, the programmes that are keeping people alive [...] will have to close”.
To know more, please read:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1064892
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1064992
Author: Giulia Azzarone
