Yemen’s humanitarian crisis worsening despite donor funding
For the past six years, Yemen has been plagued by war and political strife that has created the worst humanitarian crisis in history. Today, an already fraught situation is made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, food scarcity, and the disbanding of much-needed humanitarian programs.
As food supplies continue to dwindle and starvation becomes a larger problem, it’s important to look at other factors that have led to the current crisis .
Some background: In 2014, members of Ansar Allah, also called Houthi rebels, launched their latest attempt to take over Yemen’s capital, Samaan—and succeeded. After Yemen’s then-leader President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled the country, Saudi Arabia along with Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, became involved in 2015 to remove the Houthi. The United States, and later Eritrea and Pakistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s efforts, while Iran backed the rebels. The civil war continues into today with outside interference from many of the above actors.
I’ve kept the explanation of the war intentionally simple because it just cannot be explained in the span of a few paragraphs or even pages. What I do want to cast attention toward is the Yemenis themselves.
Politics aside, each player in this civil war has launched attacks, whether through Houthi drone strikes or Saudi landmines.
In fact, the Yemen Data Project, which tabulates statistics from the war like the number of air raids, finds that 9,843 people have been injured and 8,773 have died. The actual numbers are likely much higher since it is difficult to identify every person killed or injured accurately.
Moreover, the Project also reports that medical facilities like hospitals and clinics were bombed 83 times, turning health care into a luxury that few can afford.
“We are in what might be called a healthcare desert here,” David Charo Kahindi, project coordinator of Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Haydan. “There are very few health facilities and things seem to be getting worse. Our pediatric admissions have increased by 45% compared to the same four months last year, and overall we are seeing more serious patients coming to us: while the number of people coming to the ER is stable, we are admitting double the number of them than we were last year,” Kahindi said to Al Jazeera.
Now, with COVID-19, hospitals struggle to take care of patients whose ailments range from war injuries to women with birthing complications, to malnourished children. Diseases are rampant in the country, like the Cholera outbreak of 2017 that killed a million people, leaving much of the population immunocompromised and thus, more vulnerable to COVID-19.
Yemen’s medical facilities are at total capacity right now, to say the least, creating a dire situation for people of all ages, worsened by the fact that since 2016, Houthi forces’ have threatened medical personnel forcing many to leave the country.
While vaccination efforts are underway to protect the population, stopping the growing starvation in the nation is yet another herculean task.
In an April 2020 panel hosted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Lisa Grande, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, explained that current projections indicate 16 million people in Yemen, 55% of the population, will contract COVID-19.
Through the COVAX program, Yemen is promised 1.9 million vaccine doses throughout 2021—but that is less than 7% of its approximately 30 million population. The Houthis have also blocked shipments of vital COVID-19 preventative measures. They took “containers belonging to the World Health Organization and a PPE shipment” to have leverage in negotiations for aid in May. According to the Human Rights Watch, they said “they would release 118 of the containers in late August or early September,” according to the Human Rights Watch.
As of now, 1,658 Yemenis have died from COVID-19. This number may be higher because Houthi authorities have been accused of underreporting the number of cases and deaths in areas under their control.
While vaccination efforts are underway to protect the population, stopping the growing starvation in the nation is yet another herculean task.
Instances like the one mentioned before, with Houthi forces impeding shipments, donors funding aid programs in Yemen have reduced or even stopped their contributions. This move is a critical blow to Yemen, where 80% of the population needs humanitarian aid to survive.
According to Beasley’s estimates, 135 million people were starving before the coronavirus pandemic, but that number is up to 270 million now.
As an arid country, Yemen imports the vast majority of its food. But this means that when global prices fluctuate, Yemen is forced to pay higher prices that its citizens cannot afford.
Without donor funds keeping health and food programs alive, more people will die since the World Food Programme (WFP) cannot sustain people alone. It revealed in a report that though it provides financial assistance to Yemenis, “3 million of the 13 million people WFP supports with food assistance still only receive food assistance on alternate months as funding remains uncertain.”
Hence, the United Nations held a meeting in June calling on donors to fulfill their pledges immediately to allocate funds in the sectors that need them the most in Yemen. 98% of pledged funds were donated, amounting to just over $2 billion, according to Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.
Still, it seems not to be enough.
The WFP, recently announced concerns over the increasing number of Yemeni citizens who could starve in the immediate future.
“With food pricing and the lack of fuel, it is catastrophic. We’ve got 5 million people right now knocking on famine’s door, we’ve got 16 million people marching toward starvation,” David Beasley, executive director of the WFP recently, said.
Bombarded by warfare, COVID-19, and starvation, Yemenis simply cannot find work that could help bring income for families or treatment. Many have chosen to migrate—only to see an already complicated and deadly situation become even worse.
In June 2021, about 300 migrants died trying to reach the popular yet treacherous route to the Gulf States through the Horn of Africa. Their ship capsized at Ras al-Arah on Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
Without proper funding and an end to the civil war, Yemen, and its people, including refugees and displaced populations, are left with few options that to mitigate their suffering and potential starvation.
