What's New

Climate change impacts—including increasing temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and intensifying extreme weather events—have hit Nigeria hard, reducing agricultural productivity, driving up food prices, and limiting access to nutritious food. Climate-related damage to roads, irrigation, education, and health care infrastructure has also undermined food production and access to essential services.

The world faced a stark inflection point in 2024, as the continued rise in the number of people facing crisis-to-catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity meets sharp reductions in funding for humanitarian assistance. The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), released today, reports that 295.3 million people across 53 countries/territories faced acute food insecurity in 2024. This represents a tripling of the number of people facing acute hunger since 2016 and a doubling since 2020 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Current U.S. trade policies—though primarily focused on major global players including China, the European Union, and North American partners Canada and Mexico—also have economic consequences for smaller countries and regions around the world. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), these impacts will be felt both directly, through newly imposed tariffs, and indirectly, as collateral damage in a potential trade war between the world’s largest economies.

Food systems around the world face growing challenges. They must be transformed to sustainably feed a growing global population and made more resilient to shocks from extreme weather to conflict. Efforts on those fronts are increasingly interlinked—and depend on well-targeted local interventions.

In a world where data drives decisions, the importance of high-quality health and nutrition data cannot be overstated. Reliable data is the backbone of effective policymaking, intervention planning, and resource allocation—all critical for improving public health outcomes. For Ethiopia, a country grappling with significant health and nutrition challenges, the need for consistent, accurate, and timely data has never been more urgent.