The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the most neglected number of displaced people in the world, according to a new report from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
Revealing its annual index, the aid agency said on Thursday that last year two million people moved to the DRC. And with 27 million people, including more than three million children who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, it has the largest number of people in the world facing food insecurity.
“The DRC is one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century,” said Jan Egeland, NRC secretary general. “A lethal combination of spiraling violence, record levels of hunger and total neglect has ignited a mega-crisis that guarantees a mega-response. But instead, millions of families on the brink of the abyss seem forgotten by the outside world and they stay out of any support lifeline ”.
African countries once again topped this year’s list of the ten most abandoned displacement crises in the world, with the DRC at the top of the list, followed by Cameroon, Burundi, Venezuela, Honduras, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Central African Republic and Mali.
The NRC said the COVID-19 pandemic further worsened the plight of vulnerable people, leaving millions who were already struggling to survive in abandoned crises even further behind. The few incomes that had disappeared, the needs skyrocketed and the international funding dried up.