War victims get humanitarian aid

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said that between 28 February and 5 March it delivered 1,360 mt of food aid and 218 mt of non-food items by air, for hundreds of thousands of displaced people in war-torn Angola.

A further 1,264 mt of food was delivered by road.

In the central Bie Province the deterioration of the runway at Kuito airport and its closure over weekends has continued to limit the number of cargo flights. In its latest update, WFP said that it was organising 10 daily flights to deliver 2,900 mt of food to Kuito during March, “thus covering 100 percent of the projected needs for March”.

WFP said that by 6 March it had delivered 30 mt of food to the city of Ganda in the coastal Benguela Province. It said that the overall nutritional situation of people in Ganda and Balomba to the north “was deteriorating”. “A nutritional survey carried out by Action contre la faim (ACF), which includes both the internally displaced people (IDP’s) and resident populations, showed 7.4 percent global and 1.8 percent severe malnutrition among resident children and 23.1 percent global and 6.2 percent severe malnutrition for IDP children,” WFP said. It intends, during March, to distribute 810 mt to 36,097 people.

In Huambo Province in the central highlands, WFP said IDP’s have been “pouring” into the provincial capital. WFP said that it would start distributing food as soon as the number of people have been confirmed and the registration process finalised. It plans to distribute food to 205,749 people in March.

In the Zaire Province, on Angola’s northern border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a WFP visit to the provincial capital M’banza Congo found returnees from the DRC. “According to the newly arrived people, the camp conditions in the DRC are deteriorating to such an extent they prefer to return,” WFP said. During March, WFP plans to distribute food to 8,935 people in the province.

In the northern Uige Province, therapeutic and supplementary feeding centres run by the Spanish chapter of Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF-Spain) were being attended by an increased number of IDP’s and resident children with malnutrition-related illnesses and other diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea. The supplementary feeding centre at the Uige hospital was assisting 1,300 children.