World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

WFP school meals are helping hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese students stay in school and build a brighter future, and WFP is working to help the young country's Ministry of Education build and sustain a national school meals system.

The program also targets 40,000 girls through the girl’s incentive pilot across 1,250 schools in Eastern Equatoria, Lakes, Jonglei, Warrap, Western Bahr el Ghazal, Northern Barh el Ghazal, Unity and Upper Nile States, Chris Nikoi, WFP Country Director South Sudan said. He said that the feeding program activities are targeted in geographic areas where assessment evidence shows the highest levels of food insecurity in addition to nationally low enrolment, attendance and retention rates especially among girls.

The United Nations says an outbreak of hepatitis E has killed 111 refugees in camps in South Sudan since July, and has become endemic in the region. U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards says the influx of people to the camps from neighboring Sudan is believed to be one of the factors in the rapid spread of the contagious, life-threatening inflammatory viral disease of the liver. (..) He says the largest number of cases and suspected cases is in the Yusuf Batil camp in Upper Nile state, which houses 37,229 refugees fleeing fighting between rebels and the Sudanese government.

Aid agencies working in South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, are under regular threat from members of the security services who beat or arrest them or commandeer their equipment, the United Nations said on Monday. (..) This year, the U.N. World Food Program plans to provide food aid to over 2.7 million people, almost a quarter of South Sudan's population.

Conditions at the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan have improved - after a wave of new arrivals, disease and death. But as the rainy season ends, the camp is bracing for another wave of challenges that could overwhelm the humanitarian community. (..) For the past few weeks, the World Food Program has been forced to deliver food by air.

Newly arrived refugees at a camp along the volatile South Sudan-Sudan border say renewed fighting between rebels and Sudan’s military is likely to send thousands more people to an expanding camp here filled with refugees of war and hunger. (..) Since February, the population of Yida has skyrocketed from 17,000 to around 65,000 refugees.

South Sudan’s Upper Nile state is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from Sudan’s Blue Nile state, where conflict has raged between government forces and insurgents for more than a year. (..) Stanlake Samkange, the East and Central Africa Director for the U.N's World Food Program [WFP], said the situation improved mainly due airdrops of food - a costly last resort - but could quickly worse again if more refugees arrive, and unless more funding is found.

As conflict has raged in Sudan’s South Kordofan state and food supplies run low, a refugee camp over the border in South Sudan has swelled to more than 60,000 people. (..) Eddie Rowe, deputy director of the U.N. World Food Programme in South Sudan, said the agency will start dropping food in the coming weeks. “In country, we have enough stocks, [but] the biggest problem is to get the food into Yida," said Rowe. "So with this caseload, 60-61,000, we expect that 3,000 metric tons of food airdropped should take the distribution up to December. In the event of a new influx, we would have to expect another round of airdrops.”

It's been only a year since South Sudan became an independent nation. But the young county is already facing major challenges. (..) Now the United Nations World Food Programme is pulling out all stops, including emergency air drops of grain, to help these families. "We use airdrops when there isn't another choice," Challiss McDonough, a spokesman for the World Food Programme. "We haven't done them anywhere in the world since 2009. But there is an urgent need to get food to these people."

Officials from a United Nations food agency air-dropped 32 metric tons of food to refugees on the South Sudan-Sudan border, an expensive, last-ditch way to get food to tens of thousands of people who have been forced out of Sudan by fighting and hunger, an official said Thursday. (..) "This is the first in a series of airdrops that aims to replenish rapidly diminishing food stocks for more than 100,000 people who have fled the fighting north of the border," said WFP Director Ertharin Cousin, who is touring the region.