East Africa and Yemen: Annual Report 2017

Despite many odds, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) provided emergency assistance and durable solutions to more than 3 million people in the nine countries of the East Africa and Yemen programme.

In South Sudan, with more than 6 million people nationwide not having enough to eat, lack of access to food became the biggest crisis. In most parts of the country, people survived by eating wild fruits, cactus leaves, water lilies and other desperate survival tactics. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people continued to flee the country to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.

The population of refugees in Uganda had risen to nearly 1.4 million people by the end of the year, with more than 1 million from South Sudan and 230,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Yemen, a staggering 22 million people required some form of humanitarian aid or protection last year. The key drivers of Yemen's crisis continued to be ongoing violence, the blockade of main ports, interference in aid delivery, the erosion of public services and rapid economic collapse.

"Conflict drove the crises in Yemen and South Sudan, leading to drastic rises in malnutrition and cholera in both countries. These crises are intolerable, and they drive NRC and our partners to continue our life saving work," says Nigel Tricks, Regional Director for NRC in East Africa and Yemen.