Hundreds of thousands of people in Kenyan refugee camps are facing severe food shortages, with children being the most vulnerable. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to reduce food rations to their lowest ever levels due to funding cuts, particularly from the US, which previously provided around 70% of the funding for WFP’s operations in Kenya.
At the Kakuma refugee camp, home to roughly 300,000 refugees, the impact of the crisis is starkly visible. Emaciated children fill the wards at Amusait Hospital, staring blankly at visitors as they receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition. Agnes Awila, a refugee from northern Uganda, struggles to feed her nine-month-old baby, James, who depends on the WFP for vital sustenance. “The food is not enough, my children eat only once a day. If there’s no food what do you feed them?” she asks.
Felix Okech, WFP’s head of refugee operations in Kenya, warns that the reduced rations will lead to a “slowly starving population.” “If we have a protracted situation where this is what we can manage, then basically we have a slowly starving population,” he says. The WFP has had to slash the refugees’ rations to 30% of the minimum recommended amount a person should eat to stay healthy.
Refugees like Mukuniwa Bililo Mami, a 51-year-old mother of two, are struggling to make ends meet. “I am grateful to receive this little [food] but it is not enough,” she says. She used to receive cash transfers from the UN, which allowed her to buy food suitable for her diabetes and start a vegetable garden. However, the discontinuation of these transfers has meant that she is forced to eat whatever is available.
The situation is dire, and the prospect of more funding is uncertain. Unless things change over the next two months, the refugees are staring at starvation come August. “It is a really dire situation,” admits Mr. Okech. “We do have some signals from some one or two donors about support with that cash component. But… if you’re still missing 70%… those prospects are not good”.