Attachments
Overview
Key messages
-
While 2023 was the most peaceful year in Yemen since the conflict erupted, humanitarian needs remained widespread. 21.6 million people needed humanitarian assistance, with half of the population facing acute hunger.
-
WFP assisted 47 percent of the population of Yemen in 2023. However, a USD 1.66 billion funding gap forced WFP to reduce the quantity and frequency of assistance.
-
Efforts to safeguard the integrity and sustainability of WFP operations in Yemen were challenged by the lack of an agreement with the Sana’a-based authorities on planned operational reforms, prompting the largest assistance pause in WFP’s 56-year history in Yemen.
A war-fatigued Yemeni population continued in 2023 to suffer from the cumulative impacts of nine years of societal fragmentation. Contextually, humanitarian needs remained at staggering levels, and stretched humanitarian budgets forced WFP to make difficult decisions with scarce resources. Operationally, attempts at interference, bureaucratic hurdles, insecurity, and gender discrimination impeded WFP’s ability to mount a principled response to those most in need.
While 2023 was the most peaceful year in Yemen since the start of the war, WFP faced the ramifications of nearly a decade of protracted conflict: A fragmented political and social landscape, crumbling public services and infrastructure, and dwindling donor support. Attempts at interference and obstruction was a constant occurrence. An increasingly aggressive spread of misinformation undermined the trust of local communities and stoked anti-United Nations (UN) sentiment.
While large-scale political violence remained at reduced levels, continued skirmishes and local conflict fuelled endemic insecurity across the country. Security incidents impacted humanitarian operations, infrastructure, and personnel, including the kidnapping and arbitrary detention of humanitarian personnel. In July, a long-standing WFP staff member was killed in Ta’iz governorate shortly after his arrival to Yemen.
With humanitarian budgets stretched by multiple emerging emergencies worldwide, most major donors significantly reduced their funding to Yemen. The 2023 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) was just 38 percent funded, significantly below 2022 levels. While WFP received the largest share of humanitarian funding in 2023, available resources fell significantly from what was received in 2022, and far below the levels needed to comprehensively respond to humanitarian needs.
This confluence of contextual and operational challenges limited progress towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 (Zero hunger): 16.9 million people faced acute hunger (IPC phases 3 and above), with 6.1 million of these in Emergency (IPC Phase 4). 21.6 million people, close to 70 percent of the population, were estimated to need humanitarian assistance.
In this context, WFP assistance, although constrained by fiscal, operational, and political challenges, remained essential to millions of people in Yemen:
WFP assisted 15.3 million girls and boys, women, and men across its activities in Yemen in 2023, making Yemen WFP’s second-largest operation worldwide. This represents 47 percent of the Yemeni population and includes 3.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), and an estimated 2.3 million persons with disabilities. Overall, women and girls represented half of those assisted by WFP. Further, as a key enabling partner, WFP cluster and service provision activities supported 134 humanitarian, development, donor, and diplomatic partners working in Yemen.
However, funding shortages impacted the lives of almost everyone assisted. While the overall number of people assisted remained similar to that of 2022, a 23 percent reduction in available resources led to a significant reduction in the intensity of assistance, as WFP was forced to reduce both assistance quantity and frequency.
WFP provided general food assistance (GFA) with reduced rations to all 13 million people assisted, at a reduced frequency - giving already food insecure households less food, less frequently. WFP was also forced to significantly scale down its use of cash-based transfers (CBT) in 2023, reversing significant progress made in recent years.
WFP was in August forced to mostly suspend its malnutrition prevention programme - leaving more than two million children and pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls (PBWG) at risk of malnutrition without support.
As funding dwindled, WFP was in October forced to also stop life-saving malnutrition treatment to more than 200,000 malnourished children - one-third of everyone targeted under the programme. While WFP aimed for these reductions to cause the least amount of harm (using a combination of geographic severity criteria to maintain treatment services in the worst-off areas), WFP expects the reduced reach and quality of nutrition services to lead to increased malnutrition rates in the affected districts.
As the 2023-2024 school year started, WFP was forced to reduce the scale of its school feeding programme, with 1.4 million schoolchildren no longer enjoying the nutritional and educational benefits of receiving meals at school.
Despite a consensus on the importance of longer-term interventions that build resilience and reconstitute livelihoods, WFP’s resilience and livelihoods-programme was severely underfunded. As a result, WFP was unable to expand the programme as planned, providing limited opportunities for people receiving WFP assistance to transfer from relief assistance to self-sufficiency.
Facing funding shortages, WFP endeavoured, where possible, to strategically prioritize assistance in ways that ensured the continuation of assistance to those most in need. However, in practice, the decisions on where and how to maintain assistance was often dictated by restrictions placed on contributions from donors. Most contributions received in 2023 were earmarked by activity, and many were restricted to implementation in specific geographical areas, or through specific modalities, limiting WFP’s ability to dynamically direct resources to those most in need.
Safeguarding the integrity of WFP operations was a key focus in 2023. These efforts were made especially crucial in a complex operating environment characterized by limited resources and political contention.
WFP has long endeavoured to implement a leaner and better targeted GFA programme in Yemen. However, these efforts were stymied by the lack of an agreement with the Sana’a-based authorities (SBA) on key elements, including the long-planned beneficiary re-targeting and registration exercise.
As a result, WFP, in consultation with its key donors, in November temporarily paused the GFA programme in SBA-controlled areas. This affected the provision of assistance to 9.5 million people - the largest assistance pause in WFP’s 56-year history in Yemen.
In areas under the internationally recognized Government of Yemen (IRG), the GFA programme remained operational, and the re-targeting and registration exercise made significant progress, with 1.7 million people registered by the end of the year.
2023 marked the first year of WFP’s 2023-2025 Yemen interim country strategic plan (ICSP). The United Nations Country Team (UNCT) in 2023 worked under a transitional United Nations Sustainable Development Framework (UNSDCF, 2022-2024), which - as an exception - was endorsed in 2022 without being signed by the Government. As such, WFP activities were primarily aligned with the priorities of the HRP.