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The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to be one of the world's largest humanitarian crises. Due to lacking social security programmes and a weak civil society, humanitarian assistance has been a last lifeline for the people most in need. The World Food Programme (WFP) reached more than 6 million people every year from 2019 to 2022.
However, humanitarian assistance in DRC has been inadequate for many years, with a widening gap between assistance coverage and growing needs. In four of the last five years, the humanitarian sector has only received less than half of the funding it required.
In recent years, due to limited resources, in Eastern DRC WFP has reached only one third of the acutely food insecure and has been forced to limit assistance to only four months per year, which results in coverage of barely 10 percent of the total needs.
The eastern provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu are of particular concern. These are areas where intensifying conflict and insecurity has displaced 5.3 million people with unmet needs or limited support, up to the point that 852 percent of WFP’s beneficiaries living in displacement camps have poor food consumption. This dire situation affects not only people displaced by the conflict, but a large part of the local population. In the three provinces, 5.5 million people live with crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. To keep up with the increasing number of internally displaced people and people in need, the United Nations formally launched a System Wide Scale Up in 2023, but the available resources remain very limited. Of the total US$ 2.3 billion needs of the humanitarian sector in 2023, US$ 1.4 billion is yet to be been funded. WFP faces a critical funding gap of US$ 546 million until the end of the year. In the absence of funding, WFP is unable to continue scaling up operations to reach 3.6 million people and may have to start reassessing and scaling-down assistance.
As a result of the diminishing funding and looming budget cuts on the horizon, continued inadequate food assistance will fail to address the food security needs. Inadequate humanitarian assistance also leaves nutritional needs unaddressed and contributes to an increase in adoption of negative coping mechanisms leading to protection risks, including gender-based violence (GBV). This brief assesses key consequences of inadequate assistance on food security, child nutrition and GBV in Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu provinces.