250,000 Children Risk Worsening Nutrition --UN

Joyce Luma

Ms Joyce Luma

The Country Representative for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) for South Sudan, Ms Joyce Luma, says no fewer than 250,000 children were at risk of worsening nutrition, with one in five suffering from acute malnutrition.

This is according to a document from the Economic and Social Council, made available to UN correspondents on Wednesday in New York.

Luma also told the council that the situation in South Sudan had continued to deteriorate with 1.6 million people internally displaced and more than 166,000 sheltered in United Nations civilian sites.

She said while the fighting had forced United Nations agencies to reduce staff, they had scaled up aid delivery, reaching more remote areas.

“The current conflict has worsened already limited access to health and education with 400,000 children having dropped out of school ,” she said,
She told the council that Cholera had broken out in Juba county, and among 719 cases there had been four deaths.

Ms Joyce Luma
Ms Joyce Luma

The economic crisis, she said, was deepening, with a growing fiscal deficit that threatened the lives of many.

Luna said the recent budget proposal presented a 2.5 billion dollars deficit.

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In July, 672 million dollars of a 1.6 billion dollars revised plan was funded, leaving a one billion dollars gap for 2015.

She recalled that international partners had in 2014 established a set of principles for their engagement, and priorities were focused on the most vulnerable, building community resilience and strengthening the links between humanitarian and development assistance which must be the basis for cooperation with the Government.

She said: ” if peace talks, set to continue this week, leads to an agreement, there would be an urgent need to support the peace process and consider the increased risk of local conflict.”

For its part, she said, the United Nations country team had articulated those and other issues in the interim cooperation framework, replacing the United Nations Development Action framework.

The representative said from January 2016 to June 2017, its priorities would include: strengthening resilience; health and education; improving the conditions for women and children; and promoting peace, reconciliation and violence reduction.

NAN recalls that the UN said that South Sudan needed 230 million dollars in international aid or it will face the worst starvation in Africa since the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of people died in Ethiopia famine.

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