Families on the brink of famine in Yemen

Thanks to our partner WFP for allowing us to share this blog. Images: WFP/Annabel Symington

For years, Yemen’s been described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Then, at the end of 2020, it seemed it got worse yet again: analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) showed that, for the first time in two years, pockets of famine conditions had returned to the country.

Over half of all Yemenis — 16.2 million people — are food insecure. Over 5 million are at immediate risk of famine, and almost 50,000 are already experiencing famine-like conditions. But what does that actually mean?

For Hayat, 30, it means constantly worrying about how she will feed her three little girls.

“I was crying last night and thinking about where I can get food to give them.” she says, sitting in the makeshift tent that is now the family’s home.

“My daughters wake in the night and ask for food. I have to tell them I can’t get food. They sleep hungry.”

Hayat fled her village in Taiz, central Yemen, in 2018 after airstrikes flattened her village. Her home was destroyed. Her husband was killed.

She sold the gold bracelets her husband had given her daughters, now aged 4 and 7, to pay for a car to flee to safety with. She was pregnant at the time with her third daughter.

“My husband was a labourer. Life was hard.” she says, remembering her life before the war. “But at least he was beside me.”

With each year of conflict, life has got harder still for Hayat.

She now lives in a basic settlement in Mokha on the Red Sea Coast. The once thriving port town bears the scars of Yemen’s six-year conflict: children, too many of whom no longer go to school, play in the carcasses of bombed out buildings.

Informal camps have sprung up to host families like Hayat’s