A 38 mother from Abyei told Save the Children that she has nothing to feed her three children as there is no food in the area where she lives. In 2019, floods destroyed her farm and in 2020, and she could not harvest her sorghum, groundnut and sim sim because of drought - credit | Save the Children | November 11, 2020

Nearly one million children under five years are at risk of extreme hunger in South Sudan, Save the Children has warned in a new report.

In a statement, the children’s organization said about 11 million children under five years are at risk of extreme hunger in eleven countries including South Sudan.

The estimated number is in Africa, the Caribbean, Middle East, and Asia.

According to a new analysis released on Monday by Save the Children, South Sudan and Yemen face a risk of potential famine.

The report says children in South Sudan remain in serious peril because of the cumulative effects of years of conflict, flooding, and a poor economy which have destroyed livelihoods, disrupted food production and markets.

Over the years, four million people have had to flee their homes due to the combined effects of conflict.

More than half of the population – (6.5 million) people in the country have faced food insecurity this year, including nearly one million children under five.

Some 300,000 children are also said to be suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

Inger Ashing, the Chief Executive Officer of Save the Children stated in a press statement that levels of acute hunger, which were already at record global highs before the pandemic, are continuing to rise.

“The situation is critical. We are looking at the very real possibility that thousands of children could die,” said the Chief Executive Officer of Save the Children.

According to Ashing, the global hunger crisis is caused by a persistent lack of access to nutritious food in some of the most vulnerable communities in the world.

This, she says, threatens to set countries back in their efforts to reduce child mortality and alleviate poverty.

Save the Children is now calling for an urgent and large-scale global response to help avert a humanitarian catastrophe.

The children organization stated that an unidentified 38-year-old woman from Abyei often has nothing to feed her three children.

Her 8-month old daughter was suffering from severe malnutrition.

“There are no proper health facilities to treat Adhar* where they live, and so mother and daughter had to travel over 60 kilometers on foot to reach the nearest clinic,” said the mother of a child.

“Most of the time the money I earn isn’t enough to buy food to feed my children and they go hungry.”

She added: “My daughter started to deteriorate because she wasn’t being fed enough. She began to lose weight and went for three days without food. And because I didn’t have enough to eat my body could not generate enough breast milk to feed her.”

The impoverished mother said she has “no food at home to feed my children because of a poor harvest due to drought in 2019 and then flooding in 2020.”