More people displaced in DRC in 2017: UN agency

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- More than 2 million people were displaced in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2017, double the total number of internally displaced people in 2016, a UN spokesman said Friday.

The figure means that, on average, 50 Congolese families were forced to flee their homes every hour in 2017, said Farhan Haq, quoting the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The number of internally displaced people in the country has risen to 4.49 million people, over 60 percent of whom are children. This is the largest population of internally displaced people in Africa, said Haq.

In 2018, humanitarians require 1.68 billion U.S. dollars for the DRC but to date, only 3 percent of the funding has been received, he said.

Weak governance and the many active armed groups have led to extreme poverty as well as massive human rights violations in the country, which also faces a political crisis as a result of delays in elections. Enditem