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Africa is at the center of a global food crisis.
Four of five countries facing the highest hunger burden worldwide are in Africa.
Nigeria is the global epicenter of acute hunger, with 31.8 million people facing catastrophic food insecurity.
The crisis is exacerbated by armed conflict, displacement and climate change.
Nearly two out of every three people facing acute hunger worldwide now live in just 10 countries, according to a new report released January 21, 2026, with four African countries among five most food-insecure.
In the 10 countries, there are 196 million people experiencing acute food insecurity or worse conditions. Nigeria, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia in Africa account for 105 million or over 53 per cent of them.
In 2025, Nigeria was the global epicentre or hotspot, with 31.8 million people facing acute food insecurity (IPC Phase ≥ 3). “The crisis is particularly severe in the northern states, where armed conflict, displacement and recurrent flooding have left millions of people in need of urgent assistance,” said Thierno Samba Diallo, country director, Action Against Hunger in the report.
Armed conflict, mass displacement and repeated flooding have destroyed farms, disrupted markets and forced millions of families to depend on humanitarian assistance.
Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) followed closely, each with 25.6 million people affected in each, while Ethiopia had 22 million people struggling to secure nutritional security, showed the data in the report by Action Against Hunger.
Insecurity remains a major barrier, limiting access for aid agencies and leaving many communities cut off from essential support. The nutrition situation is particularly alarming. In Nigeria, more than 5.4 million children are suffering from acute malnutrition, including 3.6 million who are severely malnourished and at immediate risk of death without therapeutic treatment.
Health systems in many conflict-affected areas have collapsed, while the lack of clean water, sanitation and hygiene services has further increased vulnerability to disease and hunger.
At the same time, humanitarian operations are under growing strain. Drastic cuts in international funding, combined with customs delays, administrative hurdles and insecurity, have disrupted supply chains. This has slowed the delivery of life-saving assistance, including food aid and ready-to-use therapeutic foods, to children and families who need them most.
Nigeria’s food crisis is part of a wider pattern playing out across Africa. In Sudan, civil war has pushed the country into one of the world’s worst hunger emergencies, with famine already declared in parts of Darfur.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, decades of conflict and weak governance have left millions hungry, despite the country’s vast natural resources.
In Ethiopia, repeated droughts, irregular rainfall and conflict continue to destroy rural livelihoods, especially among pastoral communities. So, climate change has played a central role. A prolonged drought between 2020 and 2023 devastated pastoralist communities, killing livestock and eroding traditional coping systems. This was followed by erratic and destructive rainfall, leaving families trapped in a cycle of loss and dependence on aid.
The human cost is stark. Across these crisis zones, an estimated 8.5 million children face a high risk of death without urgent nutritional support. This threatens not only lives today, but also the future human capital of the region.
Across these countries, the reasons are strikingly similar: Long-running conflicts, climate shocks including extreme weather events, economic stress and fragile governance. Together, they have broken local coping systems and pushed already stretched humanitarian aid efforts close to collapse.
Globally, countries such as Bangladesh (23.6 million), Yemen (16.7 million), Afghanistan (15.8 million), Myanmar (14.4 million), Pakistan (11.8 million) and Syria (9.2 million) also face severe hunger. Integrating data from the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2025 and the Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC)2025, the report has mapped the world’s most severe hunger hotspots heading into 2026.
A staggering 673 million people are chronically undernourished, according to SOFI. Some 295 million people across 59 countries face acute food insecurity — the highest number recorded since the GRFC began tracking crises in 2016.
The authors of the report called for an end to the use of hunger as a weapon of war and urged governments to integrate climate action with food security, warning that agriculture and water policies must be climate-adapted to protect livelihoods and avert future crises.
They stressed the need for increased, flexible and multi-sectoral funding that goes beyond food aid to support nutrition, health, water and sanitation, protection and livelihoods. Above all, it underlined that adequate nutrition is a fundamental human right and calls on governments and international actors to uphold and protect the right to food.
Africa’s deepening hunger crisis is no longer a regional emergency but a global failure, as illustrated in the report. The global goal of ending hunger, adopted unanimously in 2015 under the United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goal 2, is seriously off-track, not just in Africa but worldwide. With four years left to meet the targets, the promise of eradicating hunger now appears increasingly out of reach.
