UN confirms donor conference of crisis-plagued Sahel region

The United Nations has confirmed that a donor conference for Africa’s Sahel region will take place next week following the alarm over insufficient funds needed to keep its aid programmes in place.

The conference; which is hosted by Denmark, Germany, the European Union and the UN; is aimed at raising urgently needed funds to help the region’s increasingly vulnerable communities in the face of the coronavirus and changing climate.

The UN humanitarian agency said on Friday that ‘[Its goal] is to instill a much more acute sense of urgency among policymakers about the situation in the central Sahel’.

International humanitarian response plans in the region were currently only about 40 per cent funded. He added that this is deeply concerning in a region where more than 13 million people are currently in need of humanitarian assistance – more than half of them children, according to UN figures.

The number of people facing acute hunger has tripled over the past year alone to 7.4 million. Some 1.5 million people are also now internally displaced in the region – a 20-fold increase from two years ago.