Yemen at highest risk of humanitarian catastrophe in 2021, warns IRC

Yemen is at the highest risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in 2021, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has warned.

The country has topped the grim list for the third year in a row due to continuing conflict, and widespread hunger. The country already had very less international aid, but due to the ongoing pandemic, it has further tumbled.

IRC’s aid agency director for Yemen, Tamuna Sabadze, said that support for Yemen was now more critical “than ever”, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

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Sabadze also urged for more “commitment than we see today” from internal as well global actors to end the conflict in Yemen.

“Without this, things will not change in Yemen; the ordinary civilians of Yemen will really have no future and no hope”, the director further told Al Jazeera.

According to her, twenty four million people in the region now require humanitarian aid in terms of food, health services, education.

Other countries that were on the watchlist after Yemen include - Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Mozambique, in that order.

Also read: Yemen in 'imminent danger' of world's worst famine in decades, warns UN

The list also named ten more countries, but without being able to ascertain the intensity - Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Lebanon, Mali, Niger, Palestine, Somalia, and Sudan, in that order.

The country has not been receiving much financial aid, with the UN warning in November that the country had received less than half of the emergency funds required this year. The country has received $1.5 billion in donations, roughly 45 per cent of the $3.4 billion required. Around this time in 2019, Yemen had received $3 billion.

The UN has earlier said that 80 per cent of Yemen’s 30 million population require aid and protection. The organisation also claimed that 13.5 Yemenis are facing acute shortages in food, while 16,500 are living in conditions akin to a famine.