Yemen ranked fifth in the world in terms of risks facing the work of humanitarian organizations, according to the annual report of the World Food Program, which emphasized that the restrictions imposed by the Houthis and the lack of financing constitute challenges on its ability to continue providing aid.
According to the 2024 annual Qatari report of the UN program, Yemen has remained throughout the year a “high -risk environment”, where a set of risks included attempts to intervene, poor control of aid, financing restrictions, and the increasingly complex conflict dynamics.
The program emphasized that Yemen is still among the highest risk category in the Qatar Food Risk File, as it ranked fifth among the highest levels of risk among all the 85 operations of the program worldwide.
Regarding the working conditions of the UN program, the report indicated that political dynamics in the Houthi -controlled areas have imposed restrictions and delays that negatively affected humanitarian operations and activities and monitoring access.
The deficiency in the financing that has emerged as a result of changing the priorities of the donors and competition between emergency operations in different countries, constituted a challenge to its ability to maintain the continuity of humanitarian operations on a large scale.
Although the United Nations has been publicly condemned and on more than one occasion the campaign of arrests carried out by the Houthis and affected more than 70 workers among international humanitarian and international organizations, the World Food Report dealt with it in a very soft language.
The program said: The geopolitical tensions led to a high risk that threatens the safety of employees and the safety of operations; “What led to the detention of an employee from the World Food Program and others working in the humanitarian field.”
Significant progress
Despite these obstacles, the report states that the Qatar World Food Program has made significant progress in the process of re -targeting and registration in the Houthi control areas and the internationally recognized government control areas. He stated that it was a goal of these efforts to ensure that aid is access to the people who are in need of them, increase the transparency of its programs and projects and enhance the operational independence.
The report said that the program continued to enhance its capabilities to manage institutional risks by investing in systems that he described effectively to track and track goods and enhance multi -level mechanisms and control systems.
The program indicated that it had done a set of risk management strategies, including the principle of “no distribution without control”: to support the integrity of programs and projects and mitigate the risks of leakage of food aid and their distance from its course.
Besides, risk management was integrated into the operational decision -making process through the active participation of the Risk Management Unit of the Qatari office in the governance committees, as well as its active consultant role.
The UN program stressed that special attention and focus has been paid in risk monitoring and determining the extent to which the office accepts dealing with it, and developing operational guidance and guidelines that include major risk areas, including the field of monitoring access to aid, managing beneficiaries’ data, and dealing with banned allegations and practices.
Until the end of last year, the program clarified that all internal review recommendations were implemented, with the exception of targeting and registration procedures that are still under implementation, and said that the emergency institutional evaluation of the response of the World Food Program in Yemen (2019 – 2024), which was launched, worked to enhance accountability frameworks, and that the outputs of this evaluation are expected to be during the current year.
Reducing aid
According to the report, financial and operational restrictions were evident in the significant decrease in the volume of aid provided by the food program. With large parts of humanitarian operations during most of the year, the number of people who received aid decreased by 44 percent compared to 2023. The amount of food aid distributed decreased by 81 percent.
In addition, the monetary transfers in dollars decreased by more than half. While this was primarily affected by the activities in the Houthi control areas, the internationally recognized government -recognized regions of the interruption of aid due to the lack of financing were affected, as the World Food Program provided food assistance with shares of reduced shares for most people who benefit from aid throughout the country.
As a result of the lack of financing, the World Food Program was forced last January to fully suspend the program to prevent malnutrition, leaving 2.4 million children, women, pregnant and breastfeeding girl at risk without any support or aid.
