Highlights
United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, His Excellency Mr. Harry K. Thomas Jnr, officially hands over a US$10 million contribution to WFP at a signing ceremony held in Harare on 3 March, 2016.
WFP extends its Lean Season Assistance (LSA) to April and brings forward the 2016/17 LSA to May.
WFP undertakes an extensive district profiling exercise with donors and partners, targeting an initial 10 districts.
The 2016/17 LSA Response plan which is valued at US$229 million for the next 12 months has been launched.
Situation Update
Following two successive bad seasons, Zimbabwe is faced with the strongest and longest El Niňo event in 35 years. Considering that the most prevalent sources of livelihood in rural Zimbabwe are largely rainfall and agricultural based (e.g. casual labour, and crop and livestock production) households ability to meet their foods needs has been severely decimated as a result of below normal rainfalls, and poor rainfall distributions. These circumstances have been further compounded by the reduction in value of the remittance inflows from South Africa as a result of the weakening Rand.
Using the ZIMVAC projections and analysis of the estimated crop write offs as well as historical food security trends for the past five years as a baseline, WFP estimates the prevalence of food insecurity in the rural population to fluctuate from 30% in April and 49% (approximately 4.4 million people) during the peak of the lean season from January to March 2017.
About 95% of the country has received below normal rainfall as at 2 March. However, there has been some improvement in Mashonaland East, Midlands and Matabeleland North. The improvement of rainfall activity across most parts of the country, should result in improved crop condition. Though most parts of the country had received 50% of the annual rainfall (as at 29 February).