Africa’s Unresolved Conflicts Drive Acute Food Insecurity

The persistence of Africa’s conflicts has directly contributed to a record 167 million Africans facing acute food insecurity with an estimated 700,000 threatened by famine.

A Sudanese girl who fled Al Fasher lines up with women for a food distribution at the Al Afad camp for displaced people in the town of Al Dabba on November 20, 2025. (Photo: AFP/Ebrahim Hamid)

Acute food insecurity is when a person’s inability to consume adequate food puts their life or livelihood in immediate danger. This equates to a risk category of 3 or higher (crisis, emergency, and catastrophe) on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale of 1 to 5.

Households are able to meet essential food and non-food needs without engaging in atypical and unsustainable strategies to access food and income.

Households have minimally adequate food consumption but are unable to afford some essential non-food expenditures without engaging in stress-coping strategies.

Households either:• Have food consumption gaps that are reflected by high or above-usual acute malnutrition;or• Are marginally able to meet minimum food needs but only by depleting essential livelihood assets or through crisis-coping strategies.

Households either:• Have large food consumption gaps which are reflected in very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality;or• Are able to mitigate large consumption gaps but only by employing emergency livelihood strategies and asset liquidation.

Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.

(For Famine Classification, an area needs to have extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition and mortality.)

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Source:CFR, using data from Insecurity Insight

Based on reporting by ACSS