One year ago, simmering political tensions in South Sudan erupted into a civil conflict, leading to an influx of refugees in neighbouring countries.

Today, refugee numbers in camps are at crisis levels and growing, with humanitarian aid agencies saying they are overwhelmed and that their budgets are stretched. The volatile eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the Al Shabaab militia insurgency in Somalia and political tensions in the region have amplified the situation.

Officials from the World Food Programme say they are supporting more than 1.5 million refugees in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia alone.

Lydia Wamala, the spokesperson for WFP Uganda, said that as a result of the influx, the agency slashed monthly food rations by 50 per cent in order to cater for the growing numbers.

“WFP was forced to reduce rations from November to all refugees who arrived prior to June last year, in an attempt to ensure that new arrivals from South Sudan and DRC are catered for,” said Ms Wamala.

READ: WFP cuts food rations to refugees in Kenya in half

ALSO READ: US calls for help in feeding refugees in Kenya

As at November 1, Uganda was hosting over 406,000 refugees according to the Kampala office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. This is the largest number of refugees the country has ever hosted, eclipsing the previous figure of 286,500 registered in 1993/94.

Ms Wamala said that WFP Uganda needs $6.3 million per month compared with $2.4 million last year to meet the financial needs of some 305,000 refugees — those that are in gazetted settlements and transit centres — for which the United Nations relief agency is mandated to supply food rations.

At the Kyangwali camp, some 287km west of Kampala, there are more than 39,000 refugees, 90 per cent of them Congolese. Most of them fled into Uganda between April and July 2011 when suspected Allied Democratic Forces attacked Kamango town in eastern DRC.

At least 15,000 are affected by the 50 per cent cut in monthly food rations, according to assistant camp commandant Julius Kamuza.
In Kenya, the need is bigger, with WFP officials saying they are supporting half a million refugees at the Dadaab camp in north-eastern and Kakuma in the north-western part of the country. More than 43,500 refugees fled into Kenya this year following the outbreak of civil conflict in South Sudan mid December last year.

In addition, WFP Kenya feeds more than 630,000 refugees in Ethiopia, 263,000 of whom are South Sudanese. The rest are Somali, Eritrean and Sudanese.

Critical situation

“In Kenya, WFP requires about $10 million per month to provide food assistance to the half a million refugees in Dadaab and Kakuma.... Our funding situation is critical for all our operations in the region, and we may have to reduce rations or suspend some activities in order to prioritise assistance for new arrivals,” said Challiss McDonough, senior regional spokeswoman for WFP Nairobi.

That was late October, when the UN food relief agency sent out the caveat, and a few days later, it slashed food rations both in Kenya and Uganda.

Lucy Beck, the associate external relations officer at UNHCR Uganda, said the explosion of South Sudanese refugees in East Africa comes at a time when aid agencies in the region are competing for the same resources with other crises areas such as Yemen (food shortages), Syria (conflict) and Chad (refugees from the Central African Republic conflict).

“We are competing with so many emergency areas, and so we are terribly underfunded; for instance, the emergency fund for South Sudan is only 34 per cent funded. That leaves a huge gap. How do we deal with this?” asked Ms Beck.

Ms Beck said that services like education and health would have to be suspended because UNHCR wants refugees started on 100 per cent food rations and other emergency non-food relief items like tarpaulin, poles and latrine slab. Progressively, the food rations are reduced to 75 per cent, to half and eventually zero, once the refugees are given land by the host country’s government and start producing their own food.

Ms Beck noted that Uganda has one of the most generous refugee policies including access to land, work and free movement across the country. Because of this, WFP gives cash equivalent to the prevailing market price of food, instead of rations.

Ms Wamala said that with time, refugees in the fertile areas of the country attain some level of food security and, therefore, should be able to sustain themselves in terms of food and nutrition needs.

“Also, after five years, refugees are generally expected to have access to some form of income from casual labour, petty trade and other work,” she said.

Currently, 3,000 refugees in West Nile and Kiryandongo settlements are receiving their entitlement in form of cash, but they say it is not enough and that they need to find ways of supplementing it. For example, Florence Poni, a 39-year-old mother of five from South Sudan supplements her rations by plaiting her friends’ hair for a fee, and tilling neighbours’ land.

Worldwide, WFP operations are funded by the US, the UK, the European Commission, Japan and France.