South Sudan: Aid for South Sudan - Too Little Too Late?

International donors have pledged over $600 million (438 million euros) for emergency aid to South Sudan at a donor conference in Oslo, in a bid to avert a famine.

Delegates of 40 countries and 50 international organizations attended a donor conference to raise emergency humanitarian aid for South Sudan. By the end of the conference on Tuesday (20.05.2014), more than $600 million (438 million euros) had been raised. "This figure represents just about a doubling of the available funds for the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan," Norwegian Foreign Minister Boerge Brende said.

Before the gathering began, the United Nations had pinned a price tag of $1.3 billion on donor conference. Of the $1.8 billion needed, only $536 million had been secured. The sum now pledged at the close of the conference is in addition to the 536 million, but falls far short what the UN said was required.

Norway, the host of the conference, had advanced $63 million ahead of the conference. "We fear that the crisis will worsen significantly in the coming months," the country's foreign minister Boerge Brende said in a statement on Monday (19.05.2014)

The situation is worsening by the day

As the conference kicked off, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned that this year alone up to 50,000 children were at risk of dying from malnutrition. This would further raise the death toll in the country after thousands of people have already died in the fighting between President Salva Kiir's camp and that of his former deputy turned rebel leader, Riek Machar. In addition, Cholera was spreading rapidly in the overcrowded refugee camps, the UN organization said.

In the capital Juba alone, more than 30,000 people have been packed into completely overcrowded UN refugee camps with catastrophic sanitary conditions. On Monday, the aid organization CARE published a distressing report about the rapid increase of sexual violence against women and girls in South Sudan, who were being abused and killed by both parties to the conflict.

Aid agencies estimate that there are already a quarter of a million children suffering from malnutrition in South Sudan

Earlier, the European Union warned that there would be a risk of famine in the second half of the year. International relief organizations are trying to make sure that food reaches the country by autumn. The European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) estimates that 7.3 million people could go hungry as early as August.