The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Wednesday that the world’s 10 most neglected displacement crises are all in Africa and noted that, for the first time, every country on that list is African.
Africa leads the annual ranking of the most neglected displacement crises in 2021, prepared by the CNR, which in previous editions included countries from other continents, such as Venezuela and Honduras.
The fact that the world’s most neglected crises are all in Africa indicates the chronic failure of decision-makers, donors and the media to address conflict and human suffering on this continent,” said Council Secretary-General , Jan Egeland, quoted in a statement, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
“With the all-consuming war in Ukraine, I fear African suffering will be pushed further into the shadows,” Egeland said.
The CNR placed the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRCongo) in first on the list of countries where IDP crises were most neglected, for second consecutive Year. The northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been affected by violence from armed groups and inter-community conflicts, with a sharp increase in attacks on IDP camps since November 2021. “Now, 5.5 million people are displaced within the country and food insecurity has reached its highest level recorded so far, with a third of the population going hungry,” the organization highlighted.
DRCongo is followed in the index of humanitarian organizations by Burkina Faso, Cameroon, South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, Burundi and Ethiopia.
Burkina Faso, for example, has suffered frequent terrorist attacks since 2015, an insecurity that has caused the internal displacement of more than 1.85 million people, according to the most recent data from the government of that country.
Despite a large increase in people forced to flee their homes in Burkina Faso in 2021, the IDP crisis received substantially less media coverage during the year than the war in Ukraineon average, every day in the first three months of the year, the CNR added.
“The war in Ukraine has shown the immense gap between what is possible when the international community unites behind a crisis and the daily reality of millions of people suffering in silence within those crises on the African continent that the world has chosen to ignore”, accused Egeland.
The annual list of neglected IDP crises is based on three criteria: lack of funding, lack of media attention and lack of initiatives international politics and diplomacy.
Source: Observadora
