“(The people of South Sudan) are just like us in every way: they want healthcare, they want schools, they want hope for their future and what they want most is peace,” said U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock.
Five years of conflict have left South Sudan mired in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Currently, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 7 million people need life-saving assistance to survive; one in two people does not know where their next meal will come from; 40 percent of the entire population is displaced inside and outside the country; two out of three pregnant or breastfeeding women suffer from acute nutritional deficiencies; more than 2 million children do not go to school; and only one in ten people has access to basic sanitation services.
The event brought together donors, Member States and senior humanitarian officials, including the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan, Alain Noudéhou; the Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP), Valerie Guarnieri; and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Peter Maurer.
“We met all expectations in South Sudan,” said Ms. Guarnieri, referring to the main challenges that relief workers face in terms of access to communities affected by the conflict. The lack of infrastructure, he explained, with only 300 kilometers of roads built throughout the country, makes delivering aid during the rainy season, when 60 percent of the road network is flooded, an almost impossible mission.
Thanks to the mass prepositioning of goods before the rainy season and the use of a complex combination of air, road and river delivery systems, which required careful negotiations with the various parties to the conflict, humanitarian workers are able to reach affected populations, even in very remote areas. In 2017, aid groups helped nearly 5.5 million people of the 6 million recipients with food, shelter, nutrition, medical care, protection and other forms of assistance.
Despite the signing of a peace agreement between the different parties to the conflict in September, insecurity remains a huge challenge for the humanitarian response. South Sudan is one of the most dangerous places to be an aid worker. More than 100 aid workers have died since the conflict broke out in December 2013, 13 of them in 2018 alone.
“I call on everyone working in South Sudan to respect humanitarian workers and international humanitarian law,” said Humanitarian Coordinator Noudéhou, who explained that between February and May of this year there were several incidents of humanitarian workers being detained by armed groups for days or weeks. “We are not a target,” he added.
Much of the event focused on the need to “localize” the response, which involves empowering South Sudanese non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
“The people who are on the front lines of the response are the national NGOs, who have done enormous work and are brave,” Noudéhou said.
Angelina Nyajima is the director of Hope Restoration, a South Sudanese NGO working to empower women. At the event, he advocated for more mentoring and more direct funding for national NGOs, as set out in the localization agenda that emerged from the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit.
“We are on the front line, we are with the communities… In the event of a crisis we are not evacuated,” he said, adding that one day the presence of international organizations will be reduced. “If we don’t have a mentor right now, if we don’t get funding right now, we won’t be able to stand on our own two feet.”