WFP Palais Briefing note: Ebola spreads to eighth DRC province as WFP delivers food, builds treatment centres and keeps supplies moving

GENEVA/KINSHASA – Good morning.

For families facing Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, protecting themselves from the virus can also mean losing the means to feed their children. 

When I last briefed you, WFP was scaling up alongside the Ebola response. Today, the outbreak has spread to an eighth province, reaching communities already under immense pressure. As it spreads, hunger continues to undermine the measures needed to contain it. 

WFP has two critical roles: helping families seek care without sacrificing food and providing the logistics backbone that keeps the wider response moving. Without sustained support, we risk leaving families unable to follow health guidance when it matters most.

Earlier today, we shared an operational update highlighting the latest details about WFP’s role in this critical response. But today, I want to also share some of the personal stories that our team and I encounter every day.

In Ituri’s Mungbwalu, the epicentre of the outbreak, Francine Birungi Amoti has lost a child to Ebola. She is raising her six surviving children and another baby entrusted to her care. Violence has cut her off from her fields. She told me “If you go, you may not even return alive, and I do not have money to buy food at the local market. So we stay at home, and WFP helps us enormously.”

For Francine, food assistance means being able to feed the children in her care when reaching her fields could cost her life. This is what a crisis on top of a crisis looks like: disease and bereavement, compounded by insecurity and hunger.

In North-Kivu’s Butembo, Isabelle Kyakimwa arrived at an Ebola treatment centre without strength. As she recovered, she told us: “Food is important for us as patients because it helps us regain the strength to keep going.” Her words explain what food assistance brings to a treatment centre: regular, safe and nutritious meals that support recovery, dignity and continuity of care. 

Food does not treat Ebola. Medical teams do. But their work takes place amid severe food insecurity and continued violence that repeatedly displaces families, destroys livelihoods and complicates access to care. Food assistance is a vital part of supporting patients through that care.

At a riverside landing in Kisangani, Brigitte Akolo crosses the river to earn enough to feed her children. “If you do not cross the river, there is no other work you can do here,” she told us. Her testimony shows why health advice must account for how people survive.

For the people we serve, work and travel are not optional when they are the only way to put food on the table. Food assistance can ease that pressure and help people follow the health guidance that applies to them. Supporting livelihoods and basic needs is part of making prevention and containment of this deadly virus practical.

The outbreak is reaching communities with limited services and deep humanitarian needs, where hunger, conflict and displacement make containment even harder. Food assistance is therefore essential to the health response.

Patients in treatment centres and families also need the means to follow health guidance. Regular, nutritious meals. Families need support so that hunger does not force them to interrupt care or take additional risks to find food. Where isolation is required, food assistance helps make it possible to comply. As the outbreak expands, sustaining these services helps keep patients in care and supports efforts to protect their families and limit further spread.

WFP has delivered more than 744,000 hot meals in 60 treatment and isolation facilities and distributed over 3,000 metric tons of food to patients’ families, supporting patients and households through treatment, isolation and recovery. Our six-month plan includes dry rations for over half a million relatives of patients and suspected cases.

WFP has also built Musienene’s first Ebola Treatment Centre in under two months from request to operational handover, despite insecurity, difficult access and heavy rains. Construction of another centre is underway in Bunia. Four further centres, including one in Goma, are in the works.

WFP needs USD 115 million over the next six months, including USD 79 million for hot meals and dry rations. We urge donors to provide flexible funding now, so that food keeps moving, aircraft keep flying and critical services stay open as the outbreak spreads. 

For Francine, Isabelle and thousands of others, this means being able to seek care, protect their families and survive without hunger forcing them into greater danger. 

My ask to you today is to keep the consequences of an underfunded response in the news and in front of world leaders. The people of the DRC are counting on WFP, and we need your help to sustain this lifesaving response. No family should have to choose between following health guidance and feeding their children.

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The United Nations World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of weather extremes.

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