South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"

By Denis Ejulu
The World Food Program (WFP) is encouraging collaboration with the government and partners, to shift focus on building community resilience with the aim of reducing community reliance on humanitarian assistance in South Sudan in the years ahead.
Miyuki Yamashita, Head of Food Systems and Resilience for WFP in South Sudan, said that under this 2024/2030 Resilience Strategy, they aim to address poverty, marginalization of certain areas and certain populations in the country through emphasis on building resilience at the lowest administrative unit.
“So we realized that WFP would also have to look at having this dichotomy approach to bring resilience programing to address the root causes of hunger, conflict and vulnerability to shocks. So in the strategy we speak of increasing our presence in hard- to- reach marginalized areas of deep food insecurity,” Yamashita said during a briefing on Wednesday to journalists on the new strategy in Juba.
She noted that humanitarian programing they had been mainly focused in the past was all about saving lives and did not tackle deep causes of hunger, vulnerability and also drivers of conflict.
Yamashita disclosed that the resilience strategy includes co-locating emergency humanitarian assistance and resilience building to benefit communities at household level which have been assisted through humanitarian assistance over the past years.
“We have realized that focus on crop production within agriculture is also a risk, because of increased frequency and also intensity of climatic shocks and natural disasters, so agriculture has an impugned risk of disasters so it is important to diversify within agriculture and also diversify into other livelihoods,” she said.
For example, Yamashita said that in East of Akobo County in Jonglei State, where they had been providing general food assistance and small resilience programing they realized that the resilience programing has been effective for the households but may not have reached the scale of impact at the community level.
“So we need to think about community level of resilience, so that the community as a whole will be resilient, so that those people who are not supported they all benefit from resilience building efforts, so what we have agreed is that the entire payam will be shifted from general food assistance to resilience building,” Yamashita said.
She also admitted that putting resources into food and cash transfers is taking away resources for capacity support, which is the most important part in resilience building, adding that they aim to increase the use of cash transfers to develop the local economy.
“We are appropriate reducing food and cash transfers, and giving more resources to capacity support for livelihoods both agriculture and non-agriculture and reaching more people. So food and cash transfers is very important but they are also very costly operations, so when it is needed we will continue but what we want to be is to become more targeted and strategic and effective in using food and cash transfers,” Yamashita said.
Yamashita disclosed that school feeding and agriculture support remain critical elements within the resilience building program, adding that the benefit local producers by injecting cash in their pockets which in turn benefits the local economy.
“In some deep areas of food insecurity, the communities have known humanitarian assistance as a way to be supported and to shift from receiving to doing something in the community; we have learnt that there is need to work on mindset change. We are continuing to strengthen social behavior change through media houses, radio and also leveraging community structures, women groups and conflict resolution groups and also peace and health clubs in schools and using also different ways to communicate that shifting from humanitarian to resilient support is for the benefit of the community,” she disclosed.
Yamashita emphasized the importance of empowering government and national institutions in order to sustain resilience building efforts at the community level in the longer term in the country.
The latest Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) Report, said that 7.7 million, or 57 percent of the population in South Sudan will face acute food insecurity in 2025, up from 7.1 million this year.