Humanitarian crisis looms in Southern Madagascar as drought and pandemic double number of hungry people
Food Security
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedPhoto: WFP/Tsiory Andriantsoarana ANTANANARIVO – Three consecutive years of drought coupled with a sharp recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic will leave a third of the population in Southern Madagascar struggling to put food on the table.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 150,000
- What help is neededWith severe malnutrition rates continuing to spiral and many children forced to beg in order to help their families eat, urgent action is required to prevent a humanitarian crisis.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Photo: WFP/Tsiory Andriantsoarana ANTANANARIVO – Three consecutive years of drought coupled with a sharp recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic will leave a third of the population in Southern Madagascar struggling to put food on the table. With severe malnutrition rates continuing to spiral and many children forced to beg in order to help their families eat, urgent action is required to prevent a humanitarian crisis. With drought conditions persisting into 2021 and a poor last harvest, weary communities have few resources to fall back on and many have had to leave their homes in search of food and work. Some 1.35 million people are projected to be food insecure - 35% of the region’s population. The figure is nearly double what it was in the same period last year. The COVID-19 pandemic has added to the hardship, causing seasonal employment to dry up. Many families relied on this income to get through the lean season, which peaks between January and April. “To survive, families are eating tamarind fruit mixed with clay,” says Moumini Ouedraogo, WFP’s Representative in Madagascar. “We can’t face another year like this. With no rain and a poor harvest, people will face starvation. No one should have to live like this.” Children are worst affected by the food crisis and most of them have dropped out of schools to beg for food in the streets. A WFP assessment in Amboasary in October 2020 found that three out of four children are absent from school - mostly to help their parents forage for food. The prevalence of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) in children under 5 in the three most affected regions (Androy, Anôsy and Atsimo Andrefana) stands at 10.7%. This is the second highest rate in the East and Southern Africa region. The most recent projections put the number of children likely to suffer from acute malnutrition at more than 135,000, with more than 27,000 of these being classified as severe. WFP currently provides food assistance for almost 500,000 severely food-insecure people in the nine hardest hit districts in the South. Given the rapidly deteriorating situation, by June 2021, WFP intends to scale up its assistance to reach almost 900,000 of those most vulnerable. However, support will be needed for struggling families well beyond the current lean season. WFP urgently needs US$35 million to fund lifesaving food and cash distributions and malnutrition treatment programmes. This also includes emergency school feeding for 150,000 children to ensure they can stay in school and build a more secure future.
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 150,000 retained at 2021-01-12
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 e65d3c625097d03610b61736f4d1558b986fa3f0977c23dd78897854f7671af3