Hunger in Africa: a crisis

More than one-fourth of all people in Africa are food insecure. Hunger, even extreme hunger, in Africa has escalated in recent years after a long period of increasing food supply for the continent’s growing population.

Thanks to disruptions caused by structural poverty, conflict, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, hunger in Africa has reached a crisis point. An estimated 346 million Africans lived with “severe” food insecurity in 2020, by far the highest percentage of hungry people (26.6% of the total population) of any continent.

The crisis is widespread particularly in the central part of Africa, south of the Sahara Desert and north of the Congo River. More than 9 out of every 10 hungry people on the continent are located in this area.

  • In Central Africa – including countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Republic, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad and Angola – estimates are that nearly 1 in 3 people (31%) are undernourished. 
  • The situation is particularly dire in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 45 million people do not have enough food to eat in April 2022, according to the UN World Food Programme’s Hunger Map. More than half of the country’s children under the age of 5 are chronically undernourished as well.
  • Heavily populated East Africa – which includes countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania – is home to more than 129 million people who suffered undernourishment in 2020, roughly 28 percent of the population.
  • According to the Hunger Map, there are currently nearly 29 million hungry people in Ethiopia alone. Approximately 36 percent of Ethiopian children are chronically undernourished.

A lack of food has devastating consequences especially for all, but especially children. One study concluded that as many as 260,000 children died of starvation in East Africa in 2021. Meanwhile, children going hungry are at severe risk for wasting (low weight for one’s height) and stunting (low height for one’s age), which can cause lifelong health issues and prevent children from reaching their physical and mental potential.

Help feed people in need with Embrace Relief

We have the ability to feed every single person on this planet, and more importantly, we all have a responsibility to ensure that we all have enough to eat. At Embrace Relief, we’ve made providing food to people in need a cornerstone of our mission. During our International Hunger Relief Campaign: Ramadan 2021, Embrace Relief delivered food packages to more than 30,000 people across 12 countries, including more than 1,300 in Greece, more than 1,100 in Yemen, and hundreds more families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. We also helped out locally, delivering food to 900 neighboring families in New Jersey.

For our International Hunger Relief Campaign 2022, we want to do so much more, and your support can make that possible. Donating any amount of money will make a difference – the amounts below represent the cost of one food package that will feed a family for one week:

So please, donate today. Every contribution you make helps one more family go to bed on a full stomach, and brings us one small step closer to ending world hunger.

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