Yesterday I was desperately in need, today I see a brighter future ahead
Jeanne Wanguezou, the mother of one-year-old twinboys recalls how she fled her village Ippy two years ago, following the rebels’ attacks which resulted in the killing of thousand of people.
By Isabelle Flore Wega
I had to walk more than 70 kilometers by foot to reach Bambari. Upon arrival, I was enrolled in WFP programme and ever since, we depend solely on the food coupon that WFP provides,” she says.
Bambari, the capital of the Ouaka prefecture located 384 km northeast of Bangui, is a place where the security situation remains unstable. In this part of the Central African Republic — CAR, where fear is still perceptible on people’s faces, WFP has been providing emergency response and life-saving assistance to over 325,000 among most vulnerable women, men and children, including Internally Displaced People like Jeanne, refugees and host families.
“During our escape, we could go more than two days without food,” Jeanne recalls with emotion. “Today, thanks to WFP, we have enough to eat, through the coupons provided. We have the flexibility to choose what food we want from the retailers nearby. This allows us to forget the suffering endured by our family.” Jeanne is now able to take care of her two boys who are also enrolled in the WFP nutrition programme.
With support from donors such as ECHO, WFP has assisted more than 125,000 people, 52 percent are women like Jeanne and 48 percent men with food coupons for a period of 12 months as of June of last year. WFP is increasingly promoting food coupons instead of food distribution, as cash-based assistance supports the local economy and gives more flexibility to the beneficiary to choose the food they like best in WFP food basket. Like Jeanne, those men and women’s live is gradually changed for the best, and they can hope for a better future. “Yesterday I was desperately in need, today I see a brighter future ahead”, Jeanne says.
CAR is a landlocked country that has been afflicted by successive coups and waves of conflict, culminating in the protracted internal armed conflict that has devastated the country since 2013.
Poverty remains widespread and high. The humanitarian crisis remains one of the deepest, acute, and damaging in the world. It is among the top 5 humanitarian crisis considering the proportion of the people in need of humanitarian assistance and the total population.
The security situation has not yet improved at a required level to allow the people, especially women and young girls, to move freely in their villages in many prefectures, to undertake some agriculture-related activities. In April this year, CAR reported one of the highest proportions of critically food insecure people in the world, along with Yemen, South Sudan, and Afghanistan: nearly 50% of the population (2.2 million people) do not have enough to eat and do not know where their next meal will come from.
