Food ration cuts have left refugees with insufficient to feed families. Shelters are in desperate conditions in places, health centres are struggling to cope with the number of patients, classrooms are overcrowded, and capacity to help unaccompanied children and survivors of sexual violence is very limited.

High rates of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) and Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) rates are reported in asylum countries, compounding pre-existing protection challenges faced by the South Sudanese refugees prior to their flight in particular for women, children and youth.

Some 57,000 refugees living in informal settlements in Khartoum are going without any assistance.

In Uganda’s Nakivale settlement thousands of refugee families are using overcrowded communal latrines, with risk of disease outbreaks, little privacy, and exposure of women and children in particular to protection risks. Education is very basic, with insufficient learning materials and overcrowded classrooms.

The lack of funding has stopped UNHCR’s cash-based assistance programme in Rwanda’s Mahama camp for 19,500 families, severely affecting refugees’ ability to meet their own basic needs.

In Uganda, limited resources means not having enough staff to ensure quality of child protection services and adequate follow up on children in care arrangements. There is one caseworker for every 150 children, and children make up some 63 per cent of the refugee population. Water provision to refugees also remains below what is required.

UNHCR establish call center to ease communication with refugees to enable them to report urgent protection and assistance-related problems, receive guidance on queries that they raise, lodge complaints about sensitive incidents or obtain general information and advice.

The Burundian refugee situation is at present the lowest funded of any situation globally. At present just 28 per cent of the US$206 million needed has been received. The impact on the 400,000 refugees in neighbouring countries is acute.

UNHCR and its humanitarian partners are developing a joint action plan to help prevent suicides by detecting those at risk and building referral systems. It is acknowledged that physical protection is not enough and there is a need to help create livelihoods. The 'Operation Hope' Campaign aims to cut rise in suicides sparked by South Sudan war. Experts believe the negative effect of South Sudan’s conflict on civilians’ mental health has been staggering.

Due to a notably slower rate of new arrivals of South Sudanese in the first half of the year, the inter-agency partners in Sudan and Uganda agreed to revise the original estimates of 200,000 individuals. The overall regional projected South Sudanese refugee population reduced by 0.5 million and stands at 2.68 million refugees by end 2018.