World Food Programme (Democratic Republic of the Congo)

The second largest country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ranked 5th of 178 countries on the 2019 Fragile States Index, placing it in the highest category of risk (“very high alert”). DRC is now the second largest hunger crisis in the world after Yemen. Hunger and conflict fuel one another, with armed conflict and widespread displacement prevailing for the past 25 years and multiple other crises compounding DRC’s humanitarian challenges.

Since 2016, the long-running crisis in the east (Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, and Tanganyika provinces) aggravated and spilled over to previously stable regions, such as the Kasai and the Equateur, forcing some 4.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) to flee from their villages and lose their agricultural livelihoods and jobs. The number of food-insecure people almost doubled from 7.7 million in 2017 to 13.1 million in 2018, making access to food a daily struggle for a significant part of the Congolese population. An estimated 5 million children are acutely malnourished.