CONGO FLOODS: 350,000 PEOPLE NEED HUMANITARIAN AID - UN

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The worst floods in six decades have left more than 350,000 people in need of urgent aid in the Republic of Congo where many villages can be reached only by boat, the UN said Friday.

Extreme rainfall since October has led the banks around the Ubangi River — a tributary to the Congo river — to burst, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

“The United Nations is responding to a flood disaster, unprecedented in scale for six decades, and with hundreds of thousands of people in need of humanitarian assistance,” an OCHA spokesman said in Geneva.

The republic, also known as Congo-Brazzaville, declared an emergency on December 29.

“Some three weeks later, nine out of the country’s 12 departments remain under water and a total of 1.8 million people are affected,” he said.

“More than 350,000 people urgently need humanitarian assistance, but access is a challenge because of the floods and many villages can only be reached by boat or canoe,” he added.

“Villages, schools and health facilities have been flooded… there’s limited or no access to clean drinking water or sanitation in the worst-affected areas.”

Some 27,000 children are out of school.

UN agencies have developed a plan with the government for a budget of $26 million, targeting shelter, food security, nutrition, health, water, sanitation and hygiene, OCHA said.

International funding will be required to implement the plan, it added.

The floods could also have long-term consequences, with a fall in agricultural output feared as 2,300 hectares (5,700 acres) of cultivated land were under water, OCHA said.

On the other side of the Congo river, the second largest in Africa after the Nile, the Democratic Republic of Congo has also seen exceptional floods.

In the capital Kinshasa, which has a population of 15 million, residential and tourist areas are also still under water.

The last flooding on a similar scale in the region dates back to 1961.