Gender inequalities and lack of women empowerment are critical barriers to achieving food security. Across the countries in the Eastern Africa Region, women continue to face adverse inequalities, ranging from social and cultural norms.
In Eastern Africa, Â鶹ÊÓƵ implemented integrated programmes action across several sectors including increasing access to adequate, nutritious, and affordable food through functioning food systems; early and anticipatory protection from climate shocks; food and nutrition support during crises; basic social services to build human capital; livelihood support; and community infrastructure and ecosystems restoration.
Â鶹ÊÓƵ-managed United Nations Humanitarian Air Services (UNHAS) played a crucial role in enabling humanitarian response in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia Kenya and South Sudan. UNHAS provided timely, reliable, cost-effective air transport service to 375 humanitarian partners. This was particularly critical in fragile contexts where access was limited due to conflict or climatic disasters, and no suitable commercial aviation options were available.
Food safety and quality are critical pillars of Â鶹ÊÓƵ¡¯s mission to alleviate hunger and food insecurity worldwide. Â鶹ÊÓƵ is committed to providing safe, nutritious, and high-quality food to those in need, recognizing the health implications of consuming substandard or unsafe food.
The humanitarian situation in the Eastern Africa region is characterized by shocks, fragility, and conflict in many countries, which continued to highlight the importance of social protection as a way of meeting essential needs, responding to crisis, and building resilience to shocks. Â鶹ÊÓƵ enhanced partnerships with governments, donors, and international financial institutions (IFIs) to mitigate the impacts of this situation through supporting the scale-up of shock responses, refugee inclusion, systems strengthening and enhancement of policy and institutional frameworks.
Â鶹ÊÓƵ navigated through a dynamic landscape, overcoming numerous challenges such as supply chain disruptions, funding gaps to logistical hurdles to ensure the effective procurement of essential goods and services for humanitarian operations regionally. Despite these obstacles, Â鶹ÊÓƵ remained steadfast in its commitment to delivering timely and efficient procurement services, contributing to the organization¡¯s mission of addressing hunger and food insecurity.
In 2023, the Eastern Africa region faced unprecedented operational, economic, and access challenges. Despite these hurdles, the Â鶹ÊÓƵ Logistics remained a resilient backbone of its operations. Our logistics operations were agile, efficient, and swift, ensuring that we reached people affected by crises.
In 2024, Â鶹ÊÓƵ continued the provision of humanitarian assistance in Eastern Africa, including in response to the effects of the Horn of Africa drought earlier in the year and El-Nino-enhanced flooding later in the year, against a backdrop of widespread insecurity and conflict in the region. All enabled by the generous contributions from our donors, crisis response accounted for 85 percent of Â鶹ÊÓƵ resources in the region.
In Eastern Africa, the year 2023 witnessed a concerning rise in the number of people, particularly children under 5 years of age and pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls (PBWG), requiring nutritional support primarily attributed to a combination of climatic shocks, including droughts and El Ni?o events, compounded by ongoing conflicts in the region.
In 2023, Eastern Africa faced rising humanitarian needs due to conflict, climate hazards, and economic shocks. The number of food-insecure people doubled over five years to 63 million.
Even though decreased humanitarian funding strained Â鶹ÊÓƵ's capacity to deliver vital aid, Â鶹ÊÓƵ introduced prioritization measures, still managing to reach nearly 40 million people with food and nutrition assistance.
As we cross the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and amidst stalled progress on achieving gender equality, the independent evaluation offices of UN Women, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and Â鶹ÊÓƵ saw an opportunity to conduct an inter-agency synthesis of UN system evaluations related to Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5, gender equality).
Â鶹ÊÓƵ¡¯s high frequency mobile vulnerability analysis and mapping (mVAM) surveys provide regular insight into Afghanistan¡¯s household food security situation.
Building on analysis and lessons learned these reports provide recommendations to strengthen and institutionalize linkages between disaster risk finance and social protection to make systems more shock-responsive.
The Partnership Pillar synthesis is the first commissioned by the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition. The full synthesis report and an accompanying brief were launched at the 2023 UN General Assembly on the 17th of September 2023.
