Had a very constructive meeting on Tuesday at the UK Foreign Office about the UK's South Sudan policy in the shadow of a humanitarian crisis and delayed elections.
I can't share all the details of what was a closed-door discussion with the South Sudan NGO working group, the British embassy in Juba, and UK Special Representative for South Sudan Clare Staunton, but given the recent (and justified) attention on Sudan, I think it's important to remember the desperate situation in neighbouring South Sudan. A few statistics stand out:
➡ 9 million people (75% of the population) are classified as "in need", including 1.7 million malnourished children, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA)
➡ 1.3 million people have been affected by flooding (UNOCHA), which has displaced 700,000 people (Ministry of Water)
➡ 2 million people in South Sudan are internally displaced (UNOCHA) - largely due to flooding and conflict
➡ More than 800,000 people have fled to South Sudan to escape the conflict in neighbouring Sudan (UNOCHA)
The meeting shed light on the increasing challenges faced by the local population in South Sudan and by the NGOs trying to provide medical and humanitarian support.
It also covered the policy challenges posed by yet another delay to national elections that were scheduled to take place in December.
To read more on these aspects, please read my extended post on my Substack newsletter, perspicacity:
https://lnkd.in/gVdY2wEC
with Natalia Chan, Laban Ashioya, Pia P., Jodie Winston, Kamba Anthony, Lindsay Sohn, Kim Nelson, Elise Nalbandian, Megan Greenhalgh MSc, Mark Adams, Jodie Winston, David Adam, rosalind marsden
#SouthSudan #elections #humanitarianaid #conflict #Sudan #refugees
Advocate Scholar focused on Decolonial Anti-capitalist Praxis grounded in Reparative Justice, Abolition, & Political Economy of Radical Love/Revolutionary Humanism
5moThank you for sharing this important article. And thank you Gauri Sreenivasan and Canadian Council for Refugees for tirelessly exposing the racist disregard by Canadian immigration department of refugees and immigrants from Africa. Canada needs to prioritize African countries and urgently needs to step up and offer large scale equitable levels of immigration and refugee resettlement programs for people from conflict affected countries in Africa including Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia/Eritria/Tigray, and more. We need to ensure that people without anchor famiies in Canada also have accessible pathways. We have plenty of valuable institutional learnings and experiences from large scale resettlement of Afghan and Syrian refugees that we can utilize to facilitate large scale resettlement of immigrants and refugees from conflict affected countries from Africa.