08 May 2017•Update: 09 May 2017
By Parach Mach
JUBA, South Sudan
War and famine in the world's youngest nation, South Sudan, have forced more than one million children to flee their homes, creating the most worrying refugee crisis in the world, the United Nations Children's Fund and the U.N Refugee Agency said in a joint press release on Monday.
"The horrifying fact that nearly one in five children in South Sudan has been forced to flee their home illustrates how devastating this conflict has been for the country’s most vulnerable," said Leila Pakkala, UNICEF’s Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa.
"Add this to the more than one million children who are also displaced within South Sudan, and the future of a generation is truly on the brink," she added.
Children make 62 percent of more than 1.8 million refugees from South Sudan, according to the latest UN figures. Most have arrived in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
"No refugee crisis today worries me more than South Sudan,” said Valentin Tapsoba, UNHCR’s Africa Bureau Director. "That refugee children are becoming the defining face of this emergency is incredibly troubling."
According to the UN, more than 1,000 children have been killed or injured since the conflict first erupted in 2013, while an estimated 1.14 million children have been internally displaced within the war-torn East African nation.
Figures from the UN also say that nearly three quarters of the country’s children are out of school, the highest proportion of out-of-school children in the world.
Since 2013, South Sudan has been torn mired in deadly conflict between government troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebels backing former Vice President Riek Machar.
Fighting since has torn the country along ethnic lines, killing tens of thousands and displacing three million from their homes.
