More than three million people are at risk of starvation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations (UN) food agency has warned. Hundreds of thousands of children may die in the coming months if aid is not urgently delivered to the conflict-wracked central African nation, said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP). Violence erupted between rebel militia and government forces in Congo’s Kasai province in August 2016 and has intensified since President Joseph Kabila refused to step down when his constitutional mandate ended in December.
The conflict has left 1.5 million people homeless, many of them children, in a country still recovering from a brutal civil war. Mr Beasley visited Kasai this week and described what he saw as a “disaster”.
“We saw burned huts, burned homes, seriously malnourished children that had been stunted, obviously many children have died already,” he told the BBC. “We’re talking about several hundred thousand children there that will die in the next few months if we don’t get first funds, and then second food, and then third access in the right locations.”
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