(Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday it approved about $114.8 million in emergency funding support for South Sudan, where millions are facing food insecurity.
“This emergency financing under the Food Shock Window will help South Sudan to address food insecurity while maintaining social and growth-enhancing spending,” it said in a statement.
South Sudan broke away from Sudan in 2011, but two years later it plunged into a civil war that killed 400,000 people.
Despite a 2018 peace deal between the two main antagonists, bouts of fighting have continued to kill and displace large numbers of civilians.
Four years of intense flooding, the war in Ukraine and the COVID pandemic have worsened an already dire humanitarian situation, with some 8.3 million people, or two-thirds of the population, facing acute food insecurity, the IMF said.
The IMF’s executive board also discussed a 9-month staff-monitored program that was approved in February by its management with the aim of “helping the authorities establish a track record toward an IMF-supported upper credit tranche (UCT) program”, the statement said.
(Reporting by Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
