The prolonged drought and economic crisis has pushed millions of Zimbabweans closer to starvation in what the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned was an increasingly desperate situation.
Nearly 8-million people now face food insecurity. The WFP plans to double the number of people it helps, up to 4.1-million, but needs more than $200m (R2.85bn) for its emergency response in the first half of 2020 alone.
WFP's operational scale-up is challenging in many respects. Owing to the acute shortages of local currency and rapid inflation, it entails a large-scale switch from cash-based help to food distributions.
Because drought and flooding have tightened the availability of food across much of southern Africa, nearly 200,000 tons of food required to deliver assistance to the 4.1-million people targeted by WFP must be sourced from beyond the continent, shipped to neighbouring SA or Mozambique and moved by road into landlocked Zimbabwe.
WATCH | Zimbabwe plunges towards hunger crisis
The prolonged drought and economic crisis has pushed millions of Zimbabweans closer to starvation in what the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned was an increasingly desperate situation.
Nearly 8-million people now face food insecurity. The WFP plans to double the number of people it helps, up to 4.1-million, but needs more than $200m (R2.85bn) for its emergency response in the first half of 2020 alone.
WFP's operational scale-up is challenging in many respects. Owing to the acute shortages of local currency and rapid inflation, it entails a large-scale switch from cash-based help to food distributions.
Because drought and flooding have tightened the availability of food across much of southern Africa, nearly 200,000 tons of food required to deliver assistance to the 4.1-million people targeted by WFP must be sourced from beyond the continent, shipped to neighbouring SA or Mozambique and moved by road into landlocked Zimbabwe.