South Sudan on the brink of child malnutrition crisis, UN warns

(PHOTO: World Vision / Lucy Murunga)

AT LEAST 1.6 million children in South Sudan could suffer from malnutrition by 2024, according to a United Nations agency statement on Monday.

The warning from the World Food Programme (WFP) came as the UN security council was told that the conflict taking place in neighbouring Sudan could spill over to add to the humanitarian crisis facing the country.

The WFP said that the climate emergency was having a devastating impact on the region and was leading to worsening health conditions for the whole population but hitting children under the age of five the hardest.

WFP representative in South Sudan Mary-Ellen McGroarty said: “We are seeing an extremely worrying increase in malnutrition, which is a direct consequence of living in overcrowded and water-logged conditions.”

Ms McGroarty warned about the spread of water-borne diseases and how this causes almost any attempt to prevent and treat malnutrition to fail.

A statement from the WFP said that Rubkona is the most-affected county, where the floods of the Nile and Lake Victoria have submerged communities since 2021.

WFP predicts that Rubkona is likely to reach stage five of severe malnutrition, the highest classification within the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

The mounting health and humanitarian crisis facing South Sudan could be worsened as the military conflict taking place in neighbouring Sudan moves closer, UN special envoy for the Horn of Africa Hanna Serwaa Tetteh warned the security council on Monday.

Ms Tetteh said that fighting between Sudan’s army and rival paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), now in its seventh month, appears to be moving closer to South Sudan and the disputed Abyei region

Ms Tetteh pointed to the RSF’s recent seizures of the airport and oil field in Belila, around 34 miles south-west of the capital of Sudan’s West Kordofan State.

She said that the conflict is creating “significant humanitarian, security, economic and political consequences that are a matter of deep concern among the South Sudanese political leadership.”

Sudan was plunged into chaos in mid-April when simmering tensions between the military and the RSF exploded into open warfare in the capital, Khartoum, and other areas across the east African nation.

More than 9,000 people have been killed and aout 4.5 million displaced.

Ms Tetteh said that the military confrontation between Sudan’s two sides “is getting closer to the border with Abyei and South Sudan.”

The status of the oil-rich Abyei region was unresolved after South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011.