UN Report: 8.4 million Ethiopians Need Humanitarian Assistance in 2020
ADDIS ABEBA – Some 8.4 million Ethiopians are projected to need humanitarian assistance in 2020, a new United Nations report has revealed.
Conflicts and consecutive climatic shocks negatively impacted people’s daily lives and livelihoods in the East African nation – making the number of people in need of aid to show a slight increase.
“A total of 8.4 million people are identified to have humanitarian needs either because of critical problems related to physical and mental wellbeing, or because of critical living standards problems,” reads UN OCHA’s 2020 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO) for Ethiopia report released on Thursday
Last year, 8.13 million people were in need of food assistance.
The report shows the majority of people identified to have needs are in Oromia (3.3 million), followed by Somali (2.4 million) and Amhara (1 million) regions.
About 6.2 million people have also “acute needs that need to be immediately addressed”, it says.
The report, however, notes the number of people in a survival deficit has decreased from 4.48 million in 2019 to 2.8 million persons projected in 2020.
The most notable drop in acute needs was found in Oromia region – from 2.66 million to 1.1 million persons.
The report looked into the performance of Meher season-producing areas, the impact of recent flooding as well as crop and pasture loss due to desert locust infestations when calculating the people in need of food assistance.
Conflict induced internal displacement crisis has also taken most of the attention and resources of Government and humanitarian partners due to its acuteness and severity.
However, the majority of people in need of relief assistance in 2020 remain the ones impacted by climate shocks, according to HNO.
“Of the conflict-related need created, 1.2 million persons remain in displacement because of conflict-related drivers, while 200,000 internally displaced people who returned back to their areas of origin are still not able to live in their homes for lack of recovery support,” the report says.
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