WFP reaches over 1 million people with emergency food assistance in Tigray

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has provided emergency food assistance to 1 million people since starting distributions in Northwestern and Southern zones of Tigray region in March.

WFP is responsible for emergency food assistance across Northwestern and Southern zones of Tigray and will scale up operations to reach 2.1 million people in need of food assistance across these operational areas. Since April, it has managed to access all 13 woredas (districts) of Northwestern and assisted 885,000 people. In addition, WFP distributions began at the end of March in three woredas of Southern zone where 168,000 people have so far received WFP emergency food, bringing the total to 1.05 million people. In March, before WFP was assigned Northwestern and Southern zones, WFP had assisted 33,000 people in the Eastern zone.

This week, WFP kicked off a second six-week round of emergency food assistance, starting in Korem and Ofla, two of five new woredas in the Southern zone recently added to WFP’s operational areas. Within the first few days of operations, WFP expects to assist about 80,000 people of the nearly 200,000 target population.

In addition, WFP leads the emergency nutrition response across all Tigray with partners and is scaling up to reach people in as many as 70 woredas. Access, especially in rural areas, remains the primary challenge. WFP has delivered 315,000 emergency nutrition rations to children and women since February in 31 woredas. In May, WFP reached almost 100,000 children and pregnant or nursing women in all zones except for Western.

As well as supporting the overall response, WFP has delivered 40,000 metric tons of food for the Government and partners to Tigray and has transported 22,000 metric tons for National Disaster Risk Management Commission (NDRMC) within the region.

A total of 5.2 million people, 91 percent of Tigray’s population, need emergency food assistance due to conflict since last November.

Ahead of the results of a new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) study of levels of hunger across Tigray, WFP is highly concerned at the number of people we see in need of nutrition support and emergency food assistance and is doing all it can to reach 2.1 million people in need in the coming months.

However, WFP needs US$203 million to continue to scale up its response in Tigray to save lives and livelihoods through to the end of the year.