Uganda welcomes U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other high-level international guests and donors for the two day Refugee Solidarity Conference. The conference in Kampala hopes to raise $8 billion to support refugees in Uganda for the next four years.
At the border separating Uganda from South Sudan, exhausted women and children arrive daily, hungry and dehydrated. Aid workers give them fortified biscuits. Uganda hosts 1.2 million refugees from at least five African countries. Nearly one million have fled the conflict in South Sudan, and most have arrived in the past year. The local food supply is stretched to the limit.
“The U.N. World Food Program was forced to cut food rations to refugees last month. Yes, we have been forced to reduce the distribution for the month of May by 50 percent, but that is mainly due to the physical availability of food and arrival of food in the country,” WFP country representative El Khidir Daloum.
The United Nations and 57 other aid organizations working in northern Uganda, appealed for $1.4 billion to provide food and shelter this year, but only 18 percent of the funds has been received.
“There is one woman who has nine children, her and her children witness their father being killed, not to mention the trauma of fleeing the Equatoria’s,” she said. When they arrived in Uganda, because there is no capacity for them to get additional support, she is now supposed to build a shelter herself, find food for the children, deal with the trauma of the children,” Amnesty International Deputy Regional Director Michelle Kagari.
Source: VOA News. Read full article here.
20 June, 2017
