Chartbook 281 137 million people: From DRC to Yemen - a megaregion in polycrisis.

If you start with the Global Humanitarian Overview for 2024, the answer, for most of us, is not hard to find. The on-going humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar are huge. Central America and Haiti should garner far more attention. But by far the largest and most underreported region of crises is the belt that stretches from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the North East by way of Burundi, Chad, Sudan and South Sudan, into Northern Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and across the Red Sea to Yemen.

At the end of 2023, around 110 million people were thought to be in need of humanitarian assistance across this mega-region. If you include the Democratic Republic of Congo, which adjoins East Africa, the total of people in need comes to 136 million, or 37 percent of all the people in the world in need of humanitarian relief.

To use humanitarian statistics of need as our metric, flattens a hugely complex and diverse human experience. It risks reducing Africa to a panorama of disaster. But by the same token if we don’t address these numbers we don’t do justice to the huge scale and multiplicity of crises impacting the region and its people.

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