DRC’s displaced families at risk

MUGUNGA. — Some of the most haunting victims of the two decades of conflict ravaging eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are the starving children — and with the World Food Programme struggling to fund its operations here, their fate looks likely to get worse. At the Mugunga I refugee camp, where more than 50 000 displaced people live crowded together under white tents, hundreds of mothers line up at the health centre to get a special liquid called “premix” — a porridge of maize-meal, soya, oil and sugar that provides their children 1 057 precious calories. It also lures the mothers into the clinic — a handful of dilapidated, one-storey buildings sheltered by a copse of large trees — for paediatric care and lessons on nutrition.

The programme has rescued more than 900 children from malnutrition in the past 10 months.

But its future is threatened by the financial troubles the WFP is facing in DR Congo. The UN food agency has been hit by a funding shortfall because of budget constraints in economically stagnant donor countries and emergencies such as the Syria conflict that have devoured resources that would have otherwise been spent elsewhere. — AFP.