Some 15,000 people across Africa are forced to flee their homes every day in the first half of the year due to conflicts, violence and disaster, international monitors said on Wednesday.
A total of 2.7 million Africans were internally displaced within their own countries in the first six months of 2017, joining an estimated 12.6 million internally displaced by the end of last year, a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) found.
That number does not include those who have fled across borders to seek refuge, with UN figures showing there were more than 5.6 million refugees in Africa by end of last year.
DRC, Nigeria and South Sudan are regularly among the five countries worst affected. In East Africa, displacement is caused by protracted and cyclical conflicts such as those in Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan, bears the brunt of the crisis in regional terms, the Reliefweb reports.
In the first half of the year, 997,000 new internal displacements due to conflict were reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), more than in the whole of 2016, and 206,000 in the Central African Republic, four times the figure for the previous year.
“Behind the numbers lie the blighted lives of people forced to leave their homes, often at a moment’s notice and in the most traumatic of circumstances,” said the two organisations.
Conflict caused 75 per cent of Africa’s new displacement in the first half of 2017, and 70 per cent in 2016.
“To reverse this trend, we must focus on preventing and reducing the risk of new displacement, and this can only happen by taking early action on conflict prevention and peace-building, and overall economic and political development,” IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak said in the statement.
