World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

The roads in the Sahel region of Chad often become impassable during the rainy season, cutting off farmers from their fields during the planting season. Working with a local NGO, WFP supported a food-for-work project to construct a bridge, overcoming logistical challenges due to flooding. 

Imagine urgently needing medical attention without available commercial airlines, only tracks running in the desert. Imagine trying to deliver life-saving humanitarian assistance with roadways rendered impassable from flooding.

As families in the Sahel struggle to recover from this year’s hunger crisis, tens of millions of locusts threaten to swarm across the region devouring the new harvest. To ensure that doesn’t happen, WFP has airlifted insecticide to Mali and Chad in a joint operation with its sister agency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Getting food assistance to hungry people in Chad and other remote areas of Africa's Sahel region is hard at the best of times. And with the region now hit by a major hunger crisis, the pressure on WFP's logistics team is higher than ever. Some new mapping technology is providing welcome support.

For the third time in a decade, drought in the Sahel region of Africa is threatening millions of people with hunger. But how do people survive in these situations and what are we doing to help them? Here are the answers to eight questions about the current hunger crisis in the Sahel and WFP's response to it.

WFP has launched an emergency operation to deliver life-saving food assistance to thousands of people fleeing conflict in Mali. As refugees stream into areas already strained by drought in the Sahel, it's imperative to reach them with assistance in time for the summer Hunger Season.

 In the Sahelian band of Chad, where pastures are extremely dry and harvests are poor after erratic rains, 1.2 million people will require emergency food assistance over the coming months.

For the third time in a decade, drought has returned to the Sahel region of West Africa bringing hunger to millions of people across the region. WFP is pre-positioning food assistance ahead of the annual lean season when the vulnerable – especially women and children – are most at risk of malnutrition.

In early September, WFP nutrition focal points and their government counterparts from 18 countries across West Africa gathered in Dakar for a four-day workshop.