By Philip Buda Ladu
The Oxfam Intermon Executive Director, Franc Cortada Hindersin, who concluded his five-day working visit to Juba on Friday is putting Oxfam donor community on notice to step up their efforts in response to hunger-stricken, flood affected communities in South Sudan.
The Executive Director of Oxfam Intermon who concluded visit to South Sudan with a news conference told journalists that a lot of joint effort continues to be needed to end the dire hunger situation that many communities he visited still live in.
He said that the people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2022 has reached peak levels, saying they need to urgently scale up operations to tackle the current hunger situation across the country –more especially in the flood affected communities.
“My message back to the Head Quarters is a sense of urgency and the fact that we collectively as Oxfam, we need to challenge our own donors to step up their game and to make sure that they are putting money behind these crisis,” said Franc Cortada.
“It is about influencing donors, and making sure that there is money to support the South Sudanese people. It is also about us reaching funds, we will be reaching out to our own constituencies, you know that Oxfam is a large organization we are privileged to have millions of people who support us every year, we want to reach out to those people and tell them to support us in this crisis,” he added.
The Executive Director said that Oxfam South Sudan is currently working on a budget of around 15 million Euros a year, and they are looking forward to adding more money around 8 million to support and reach to all the affected people.
“Donors must complement humanitarian aid with greater investments in long-term resilience activities and development assistance to create livelihood opportunities for all South Sudanese citizens. Greater aid allocations, combined with demands for progress in sustainable peace, will contribute to a better future for South Sudan,” Cortada emphasized.
The visiting Oxfam Chief said that they feel it is a joint responsibility not only for the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity (R-TGoNU) but everyone else involved in making sure that the South Sudanese people get their fair share of having peace and going back to their gardens peacefully.
He acknowledged some efforts from the government and especially from Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) about security and access.
“RRC has played a massive role in ensuring that as humanitarian actors, we can access and we feel safer, still acknowledging that there has been a pocket of instability and inter-communal conflicts though, security and access has been a key access where the government has played a significant role,” Cortada noted.
He added that with notable progress being made in the peace process, it is encouraging to see that despite pockets of instability, some communities have efforts to bounce back from the shocks of floods saying that these efforts require additional support to make building resilience easier for them.
Oxfam said that it has launched a hunger response to fight the hunger situation in the most in-need communities. Following the recent release of the IPC food security assessment results, more than 8 million people are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance across the country.
The charity organization said that it is currently supporting half a million people with humanitarian assistance including clean water, hygiene facilities, food, fuel and income support.