Yemen
Urgent Appeal
started work in Yemen
people displaced since the start of September
Yemen was already one of the world's largest humanitarian crises.
This month it became sharply worse. In the first week of September, around 13,500 people were forced from their homes due to ongoing violence. By the mid-September, that number has passed 85,000, and it is still climbing.
Families are fleeing the western coastal governorates of Taiz, Hudaydah and Lahij. More than 2,000 have crossed the sea into Djibouti, arriving with nothing.
For many, this is not the first displacement. Some families are now refugees for the second or third time in twelve years of conflict, each time with less left than before.
They are arriving in communities already stretched past capacity. Across Yemen, 22.3 million people, more than two thirds of the population, need humanitarian assistance.
The need for aid
Hunger is the most immediate threat. More than 18 million people in Yemen face acute food insecurity, over half the country, and conditions are still deteriorating. More than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished. Yemen’s 2025 humanitarian appeal closed just 29 per cent funded, so organisations are meeting that need with a fraction of what it requires.
The health system cannot absorb the pressure. Fewer than six in ten health facilities are fully functional, and near the fighting hospitals have suspended routine services, including maternity care, to treat the wounded. Relief supplies were already run down responding to last month’s flooding, leaving aid teams to meet this displacement with depleted stocks.
Women, children, and people with disabilities face the sharpest risks, because the services they depend on are the first to become unreachable. Children’s education is being interrupted again as schools are used as shelters. Families who lost livestock and tools in the rush to flee have lost their income with them.
The most urgent needs
on the ground include:
Food packages
Emergency food for newly displaced families and households already going without.
Clean water and hygiene
Safe water and hygiene supplies to hold back disease in crowded displacement sites.
Emergency health care
Medical supplies and support for facilities treating the wounded and the chronically ill.
Shelter and household items
Shelter materials and essential household goods for families who arrived with nothing.
How your
gift helps
IDRF has worked in Yemen since 1984. Our food programmes already operate in Aden, Lahj and Abyan, the communities now receiving displaced families.
Our teams are assessing needs across the affected areas as the situation develops. In the meantime, we are distributing emergency kits containing food staples to families who arrived with nothing.
$100 helps provide an emergency food kit for a displaced family.
