LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The United Nations appealed on Thursday for $2 billion (1 billion pounds) to help more than 20 million people across Africa's Sahel belt, where increasingly erratic weather and escalating violence have worsened widespread hunger and malnutrition.
Conflict, mainly in Nigeria and the Central African Republic, has uprooted 1.2 million people in the past year, taking the total number of people displaced to 2.8 million, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.