Faisal Ahmed, whose son, Udai Faisal, died of severe acute malnutrition, pours water on his grave in Hazyaz village on the southern outskirts of Sana'a, Yemen. Picture by Hani Mohammed AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. While all the belligerent parties to Yemen’s armed conflict have sought to leverage economic factors, the incapacitation of the central bank may represent an unprecedented escalation in this regard; the international community must act to ensure the starvation of millions of people is not employed as a tactic of this war.
In July this year the United Nations elevated the humanitarian crisis in Yemen to Level 3 – the highest designation the UN has – placing it in the same category as Syria, Iraq and South Sudan. As of October, some 370,000 Yemeni children were acutely malnourished; four out of five of Yemen’s 26 million people required humanitarian assistance, and for nearly half the population this assistance was considered life-saving.
The Central Bank of Yemen (CBY) had, until recently, been among the only state institutions to operate effectively at a national capacity throughout the last five years of political upheaval and armed conflict. Even as central government authority eroded across the country, the CBY had continued financial coordination with local governing councils to facilitate basic public service provision, dispersed monthly salaries to 1.2 million Yemenis on the public payroll, protected the value of the domestic currency and ensured importers access to foreign currency to purchase basic commodities. All this, while also fulfilling Yemen’s foreign debt obligations and maintaining the trust of international financial markets.
