Children make up 62 per cent of the 1.8 million people who have fled South Sudan for refugee camps in neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda since civil war broke out in 2013, two UN’s agencies have said.
According to UNICEF and UNHCR another 1.4 million children are living in camps outside south Sudan.
UNICEF’s Leila Pakkala said, “The future of the generation is truly on the brink,” she added that the conflict was devastating.
Two years after it won its independence in 2011, South Sudan went into war after President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of planning a coup. The conflict spread and split the country along ethnic lines and is responsible for the deaths due to famine in some parts of the country.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the ongoing civil war, among them more than 1000 children.
Aid agencies are struggling to get the funds they need to do their work according to the UN.
Image: AP