The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today launched an Arabic language website as part of its efforts to raise public awareness among Arab-speaking populations about the world’s 852 million chronically hungry people.
In addition to a Newsroom to help journalists and researchers get the latest about WFP activities worldwide, including the agency’s emergency response to the South Asia Earthquake disaster, the website also offers a series of downloadable WFP publications on food aid, policies, hunger and malnutrition.
“We want to reach as many people as possible to inform them about the traumatic consequences of hunger as well as mobilise funds for our life-saving operations. Online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the Arabic website increases the number of people that we can talk to in their own language,” said Amir Abdulla, WFP Regional Director for the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
Besides the Arabic web site and the English-language WFP.org, in the past year, WFP has launched sites in: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
In 2004 alone, WFP, which is fully dependent on voluntary contributions, raised US$3.2 billion to assist 113 million impoverished people living in 80 countries. Nearly half of those assisted live in predominantly Muslim countries.
WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency: each year, we give food to an average of 90 million poor people to meet their nutritional needs, including 56 million hungry children, in at least 80 of the world's poorest countries. WFP -- We Feed People.
