By Faisal Abu Bakr | 2023-09-29

ADEN -- Sanaa resident Umm Yassin has been making do with one meal a day -- saving the little food she has to feed her two teenagers two meals a day.

After her husband died three years ago, she told Al-Fassel, she began to work from home as a seamstress in order to pay for food and rent.

But she was unable to earn enough money on a regular basis to cover her expenses, which include feeding and schooling Hoda, 13, and Yassin, 15.

Elsewhere in Sanaa, Hameed al-Absi drives a motorcycle taxi to provide for his family of five and pay the rent on his one-room, one-bathroom residence.

He used to work for the public sector, he told Al-Fassel, but "the cutoff of salaries forced me to sell my wife's gold and buy a motorcycle to use for work."

"Every day is different from the other with regard to daily meals," he said.

"It could be one meal one day and two meals the next depending on what I earn from my work on the motorcycle, and also whether there are health-related expenses for my wife or any of my children, which take priority," al-Absi said.

Meanwhile, Aish Abdo has taken up residence under Sanaa's Bayt Baws Bridge.

Abdo told Al-Fassel he was displaced with his children from al-Hodeidah three years ago, by the war, "and the situation has not changed much as we live under a bridge and eat leftover meals provided by a nearby restaurant."

Since the Houthis overran Sanaa in a September 2014 coup, triggering a protracted war, the lives of Yemen's people have been "marked by hardship, uncertainty, and a bitter struggle for survival," the World Bank said.

"In an effort to stretch limited resources, families have had to resort to extreme coping mechanisms, including reducing meal frequency, limiting the variety of food they consume, and prioritizing which family members eat," it said.

Education sector suffers

In its 50-page report, issued in September, the World Bank also addressed the ongoing crisis in Yemen's schools, noting that children have been "hit hard in their education journeys."

"Schools are underfunded, teachers are scarce, and many families cannot afford to send their children to school at all," it said.

In Ibb province's al-Shaar district, primary school principal Sadiq Ahmed told Al-Fassel he was forced to cram students of the first four grades into one classroom, and students of the next four grades, 5th through 8th, into another.

The school has two teachers, he said, "and each of them teaches four classes," dividing their time among the four grades they teach.

While the teacher focuses on one group, "students from other grades remain silent until the lesson is over, and so on for each grade," he said.

Millions need protection

After eight years of war, international support for Yemen, where 17.7 million people need protection, is "critical," World Bank country director for Yemen, Egypt and Djibouti Stephane Guimbert said on X (formerly Twitter).

"The economic situation is dire, and no one denies that," Yemeni Deputy Minister of Legal Affairs and Human Rights Nabil Abdul Hafeez told Al-Fassel.

"The suffering was compounded by the cessation of the export of oil and gas, which caused economic hardship for the state during the war period," he said.

He noted that the United Nations has described the humanitarian crisis in Yemen as "the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history."

The crisis has had "negative consequences on livelihoods and access to food for most of the population, who have had to adapt to the situation by either reducing the number of meals per day or making do with one meal," he said.

At the same time, the deterioration of the education and health sectors has increased the burden on families.

Rising hardship and poverty

"The living situation in Yemen is utterly catastrophic," political analyst Fares al-Beel told Al-Fassel, with "serious deterioration occurring in all aspects of life."

"In Houthi-controlled areas, [public sector] employees have been without salaries for eight years," he said.

And given the decline in the value of the currency and the increase in prices, he added, most of what private sector employees receive is "mere crumbs."

Al-Beel noted that many small and medium-sized enterprises have gone bankrupt from the repeated levies imposed by the Iran-backed Houthis, which precipitated their closure and forced them to lay off their staff.

A small number of Yemeni families depend on remittances from expatriates outside Yemen, he added, while the majority of the population has resorted to making do with what they have.

"There are families dying of starvation in their homes, while other families were forced to go to the streets at night to forage for leftover food in garbage cans," he lamented.