South Sudan’s most vulnerable refugees could lose United Nations food assistance within weeks unless donors provide urgent funding, the U.N. warned Friday.
“Without immediate and urgent funding, the final food and nutrition assistance for the most vulnerable 240,000 refugees will be provided in September, cutting off a lifeline for hundreds of thousands already living on the edge,” the World Food Programme and the U.N. refugee agency said in a joint statement.
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Those 240,000 people are the last of the 650,000 refugees who had been receiving food support across the country, the agencies said.
The funding crisis is unfolding as many as 3,000 refugees and returnees arrive from Sudan every week in search of food, shelter and safety, placing further pressure on South Sudan’s overstretched humanitarian system.
“After more than two decades on the humanitarian frontlines, I have rarely seen such a painful gap between scale of human suffering and the resources available to respond,” Adham Effendi, the WFP’s deputy country director for South Sudan, said at a Geneva press briefing from the capital, Juba.
“Needs are rising while the lifeline to the most vulnerable is running dangerously thin,” he said.
Food assistance for another 180,000 internally displaced people is also expected to end in October, Effendi said.
In total, 7.8 million people in South Sudan face acute food insecurity, while 2.2 million children are acutely malnourished.
The WFP said it needed $37 million to maintain its refugee response. It also faces a $258 million funding gap for the rest of 2026, putting assistance for 4.2 million food-insecure people across South Sudan at risk.
The UNHCR, meanwhile, has received only 28 percent of the $286 million it requires this year to provide core assistance to nearly four million people.
South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011, but the country soon descended into civil war. It continues to struggle with extreme poverty, corruption and insecurity.
A 2018 power-sharing agreement between President Salva Kiir and his long-standing rival, Riek Machar, has steadily deteriorated since last year. Clashes in recent months have pushed the country toward the brink of renewed civil war.
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