Funding scarce for CAR refugees in Cameroon

UNICEF says with the year half gone, it’s only got 15% of the money it needs to provide the badly needed assistance for young Central African refugees camped in eastern Cameroon.

WFP can only deliver food rations for another two to three months, as hundreds continue to come across the border weekly. Relief assistance to Central African refugees is being undercut, possibly, by priority being given other crises around the world as reported by Eugene N Nforngwa from Garoua-Balai.

An entire generation of Central Africans who have fled into Cameroon to escape 18 months of ruthless killing in their country face a bleak future because emergency relief is seriously underfunded, a senior UNICEF official said.

More than 106,000 CAR refugees have crossed into Cameroon this year alone. The vast majority of them are women and children with wide ranging nutritional, education, sanitary and protection needs that might soon not be fully met.

With half the year gone by, UNICEF says it has received less than a fifth of the $25 million that it needs for a year’s emergency operations. WFP, another UN agency, has only enough money to provide food rations until September. Across the board, relief for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen from the arrival of tens of thousands of Central African refugees in parts of Cameroon is poorly funded, said Manuel Fontain, the West and Central Africa regional director of UNICEF.

“There is a very dire and direct impact in less funding,” Fontain said, after touring refugee camps and stretched medical facilities in Gado Bazere and in Garoua-Bulai, where hundreds of refugees continue to cross the border every week.

Thousands of children will be unable to get badly needed education and protection because UNICEF might soon have to scale down interventions to focus on saving lives while neglecting such equally important needs, Fontain said.

“What we are trying to do when we do not have enough funds is we try to re-center around the essential. The risk here is that we are going to hopefully immunize children but we might not be able to educate children. We might not be able to organize other programs that may be seen to be second priority in the sense that you want to keep children alive as a priority. But these are also extremely important.”

He said, “It is the future of these children and the future of the Central African Republic that is at stake, if children cannot be educated. I think it is basically the totality of the activities that we could do that is going to be effective.”

The situation of CAR refugees in eastern Cameroon has recently become critical, requiring more robust interventions. After weeks and even months of trekking and hiding the bushes, most are severely malnourished, dehydrated and physically exhausted on arrival at the border.

More than half, about 57%, of CAR refugees that have arrived in Cameroon since January 2014 are children bellow the age of 18. According to UNICEF, only about 3% of children of school-going age have ever been to school. The rate of malnutrition among the camps’ young residents has risen to between 30 and 40% over the past weeks.

Cameroon has the largest number of Central African refugees that have fled their country after a March-2013-coup d’état sparked of a relentless cycle of violence. The UN refugee agency UNHCR estimates that there are more than 214,000 CAR refugees from the current and previous unrest in the neighboring country. In June, the UNHCR reported more than 14,000 new arrivals. There were 15,905 in May, 18,548 in April and 25,771 in March.

Local officials and relief organizations have complained that the situation has increased pressure on parts of the country with weak infrastructure in the best of times. In many communities, refugees have outnumbered residents, often generating social tensions. In Garoua-Bulai, hospitals and health centers have seen seven to ten times more patients. Tents and makeshift structures have been raised to meet increasing demand for health services.

With so many crises around the world, the situation of Central African refugees in Cameroon and other parts of the sub-region appears to be getting less attention, said Fontain. “Concerning lack of funding, the impact of is going to be very serious,” he said.