Flooding now affect nine of South Sudan’s ten states, according to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
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The number of people affected has doubled since September. Nearly 909,000 people are affected by large-scale floods hitting South Sudan, according to a United Nations estimate on Tuesday (October 11th). The country has a total population of about 11 million, according to the World Bank (link in English).
South Sudan, the youngest country on the planet plagued by political-ethnic violence and chronic instability, is suffering floods for the fourth consecutive year. These now affect nine of its ten states, says the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in a situation note.
According to the information available, “these floods killed livestock and destroyed crops, washed away roads and bridges, destroyed homes, schools and health facilities, and submerged boreholes and latrines, contaminating springs and posing disease risks waterborne”writes OCHA.
In Unity State, one of the hardest-hit areas in the north of the country, rising waters broke dykes in two places, threatening two IDP camps and a Mission base with flooding of the United Nations in South Sudan (Minuss).
To the west, in Bahr el-Ghazal, torrential rains caused the collapse of a key bridge, cutting off the route of emergency aid to populations already severely tested. According to the World Bank, 80% of people in South Sudan lived in “extreme poverty” in 2018.