EMERGENCY RELIEF COORDINATOR VALERIE AMOS CALLS FOR MORE HUMANITARIAN SUPPORT FOR CHAD

GENEVA, Switzerland, May 7, 2014/African Press Organization (APO)/ -- United Nations humanitarian chief Valerie Amos completed her two-day mission to Chad late Tuesday, calling for urgent donor support to meet the humanitarian needs of 97,000 people who have fled the violence in the Central African Republic (CAR) and for the two million Chadians suffering from persistent food insecurity and malnutrition.

The humanitarian response plan managed by the UN in Chad asking for US$527 million is currently only 5 per cent funded.

“I hope that my visit will be an opportunity to raise the profile of the impact of the CAR crisis on Chad and be an opportunity for Chad to get recognition as a country that has welcomed refugees, not only from Central African Republic, but also from Sudan,” said Valerie Amos. “We must raise the required funding to give people who have fled across the border, as well as the Chadians who host them, the support that they require.”

Since the beginning of the year, the Government of Chad and the humanitarian community have evacuated over 70,000 people from CAR and facilitated the return of over 28,950 Chadian migrants to their areas of origin. Humanitarian partners are also assisting more than 61,000 people in transit sites. This life-saving assistance is financed mainly with regular programme budgets due to a lack of emergency funding. The situation is made more critical for those in transit sites as the rainy season begins.

“I was able to see the extremely good work that the United Nations and partners are doing to support the displaced from the Central African Republic, but I also got to see some of the conditions, including for women and children who have arrived very recently and do not have shelter and food,” said USG Amos at the end of her first official visit to Chad, which included visits to a transit site near the capital N'Djamena and to the Kanem region in Chad's Sahel belt.

In Chad, there are around two million people suffering from food insecurity and malnutrition, mostly in the country's Sahel region. Children are badly affected: last year, 45,000 children died due to malnutrition.

"We know that we need to deal with the immediate impact, but we also need to plan for the longer term, to help communities build the resilience they need to overcome the shocks that they face year after year," Ms. Amos noted following her visit to Kanem.

During her visit USG Amos met with the President of the Republic, Idriss Deby Itno, the Prime Minister, Kalzeubet Pahimi, and other Government officials. “The President's personal commitment to tackling the nutrition issue and the Government's national nutrition strategy fit well with the United Nations own humanitarian strategy for the Sahel,” emphasized Ms. Amos. “We will continue to work together in the months and years to come to deal with the underlying structural challenges in Chad.”