WFP responds as attack on Palma displaces thousands
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 happenedThe World Food Programme (WFP) is working to assist more than 50,000 people affected by the deadly violence in Palma, a town in Mozambique's troubled Cabo Delgado region .
- How many affectedAffected persons: 50,000 · Displaced persons: 500,000
- What help is needed“It’s a real humanitarian catastrophe,” says Lola Castro, WFP's Regional Director in Southern Africa, “people are heading all over the place — by boat, on foot, by road.” WFP is distributing emergency food packages to “support the people wherever they are”, and working with UNICEF to supply a “desperate population” with drinking water, says Castro.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
The World Food Programme (WFP) is working to assist more than 50,000 people affected by the deadly violence in Palma, a town in Mozambique's troubled Cabo Delgado region . “It’s a real humanitarian catastrophe,” says Lola Castro, WFP's Regional Director in Southern Africa, “people are heading all over the place — by boat, on foot, by road.” WFP is distributing emergency food packages to “support the people wherever they are”, and working with UNICEF to supply a “desperate population” with drinking water, says Castro. Families line up at the port town of Pemba in Cabo Delgado in October — 500,000 people were displaced in Mozambique in 2020. Photo: WFP/Sean Rajman Cabo Delgado province already has the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in Mozambique, with more than half of children malnourished — now thousands are walking into even deeper food insecurity. “The situation is very bad,” says Castro, “and it’s affecting Cabo Delgado’s neighbouring provinces.” She adds: “We don't have enough resources to support the scale-up that is needed.” A UN Humanitarian Air Service flight, managed by WFP, prepares for take-off. Photo: WFP/Grant Lee Neuenburg The conflict has been hammering northern Mozambique since 2017, when non-state armed groups attacked police stations in the town of Mocimboa da Praia. Throughout 2019, as the country reeled from the devastating impact of two cyclones, it has continued — throughout 2020 the violence escalated while the number of displaced people multiplied. Nearly 700,000 people are currently displaced in Cabo Delgado. Photo: WFP/Grant Lee Neuenburg “At the start of 2020, there were 18,000 people displaced — by December there were 500,000 people,” says Castro. In February that figure reached nearly 670,000 people, around 80,000 of whom are currently inaccessible because of the violence. Boxes of drinking water are distributed in Pemba in October. Photo: WFP/Sean Rajman “It’s a very serious situation,” says Castro. “We are talking about already desperate people who haven't been able to plan for three consecutive years, others who have recently been displaced, who don't have even food, water, shelter or anything. A huge humanitarian tragedy is unfolding before us.” Displaced people make efforts to reach their “family members in other places, these are host communities they know, some find shelter in government resettlement centres — anywhere that they can find that is a safe shelter,” she adds. It’s a sadly all-too-familiar narrative in northern Mozambique. As WFP reported in October , following a previous exodus: “Some flee into the bush, surviving by drinking river water and eating what they find along the way, only to return and find their homes burnt to the ground, forcing them to move southwards towards the provincial capital of Pemba and beyond. Others, fearing attacks on coastal villages, pack into boats to sail southwards, going for days without food or water.” According to the latest figures, 950,000 people in Cabo Delado and the neighbouring provinces of Niassa and Nampula are food insecure.
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against the retained source record, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 2 human-impact figures were 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
- 50,000 retained at 2021-03-31
- Displaced persons
- 500,000 retained at 2021-03-31
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 8936a116b8da965ba5323443ce02a17a7361a9309ccef84a97669c7836c558d4No external source link was stored for this record.