WFP shuts southern Africa bureau after US aid cuts
LUSAKA, Zambia
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) announced Monday that it was closing its southern Africa bureau due to funding constraints after the Trump administration announced last week that it was terminating 90% of USAID's foreign aid contracts.
The agency will now run both its eastern and southern Africa operations simultaneously from the Kenyan capital Nairobi, according to Tomson Phiri, a Johannesburg-based regional spokesman.
The WFP did not disclose how much funding it had lost from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), but nearly half of the WFPs annual budget is US dependent, although Phiri indicated that the bureau's closure would not affect specific in-country operations.
It however comes at a time when several regional states are grappling with severe El-Nino drought-induced effects, with Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Namibia all declaring national drought disasters.
"The funding outlook has become constrained," Phiri said on the Trump aid cut, with the US being the single largest WFP donor, providing nearly half of all contributions received by the organization in a typical year.
The WFP provides food and cash assistance to people affected by conflict, famine and other humanitarian crises. It is a leading humanitarian organization that uses food assistance to help people recover from conflict and disasters.
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