NEW YORK (Middle East Eye) – The United Nations’ response to the ongoing crisis in Yemen has been branded “unacceptably poor” in a report produced by an independent evaluation team.
Findings released by the Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation (IAHE) of the Response to the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen provide a damning assessment on the UN’s work in Yemen since 2015, citing a severe lack of appropriate equipment and failure to provide proper infrastructure for displaced Yemenis (IDPs), including a lack of toilets, half-constructed roads and faulty agricultural equipment.
Although the report acknowledged that the UN’s humanitarian response had managed to reduce malnutrition and boost food security, overall the $16bn mobilized by UN agencies had been inadequately used to alleviate what has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
Yemen, which is in the eighth year of a Saudi-led war which is estimated to have killed more than 230,000 people and displaced millions, has long been viewed as dangerous territory for aid workers, and the Saudi-led coalition have been criticized for imposing a blockade on the country.
However, a major problem outlined in the IAHE report is how the “conservative security posture” used by the UN has led to “bunkerization”, whereby staff end up confined to protected offices and have limited interaction with the communities they are supposed to be working with.
The report said the UN had chosen to regard the whole country as “extremely high risk” for staff, while in reality the situation is varied across different regions, leading to a reliance on outsourced monitoring and assessment.
“The UN has managed to keep the life-support switched on in Yemen for the past six years, but we found that the short-term humanitarian funding is ultimately not suited to a much longer-term protracted crisis,” said Philip Proudfoot, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and member of the Yemen Inter-Agency evaluation team.
“In cases like Yemen, there must be a shift towards longer-term development funding and support that can make sustainable improvements in areas such as nutrition, health, education, protection and livelihoods.”
Last month, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) announced it would be forced to reduce food aid to Yemen citing a number of reasons including funding gaps, price rises and the impact of the conflict in Ukraine.
Around 13 million Yemenis are reliant on food aid and the IAHE reported that food was “consistently the number one need” mentioned to the team by Yemenis.