Across Yemen 24 million people are in need of humanitarian aid and 9.9 million are at risk of starvation. The nation is also facing one of the biggest cholera outbreaks on record, with more than one million cases reported.
Tearfund’s News Editor, Andrew Horton, spoke with a Tearfund partner to get unique insights about the Yemen crisis, and find out more about the challenges the Yemeni people face.
Andrew:
Yemen has been called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. But from your experience of living there, how bad is it?
Partner:
When you look at the statistics, it’s clearly bad. But what makes it really bad is when you have friends, you have relatives, when you have people that you work and live with, and they don't know where they can go with the pain they have. So I think it becomes even worse when you start to connect it to real life and to real people.
Andrew:
How much of a factor is Yemen’s geographic location in the crisis?
Partner:
Yemen is isolated. There's water around part of it and there's desert around the rest. And so that makes it, of course, more challenging. People feel they don’t have a voice. If you consider the media coverage with other countries that have crises, Yemen just doesn’t get as much attention. It's much worse than it's being portrayed – it's heartbreaking. It's devastating.