UN Secretary General António Guterres has announced the largest-ever allocation from its Central Emergency Fund.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the AU summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
Mr Guterres said the $250m (£208m) would be spent on what he described as “the world’s forgotten crises” including famine in Africa.
This might sound like a lot of money but earlier this month the UN said it needed $2.6bn just to help the population of Somalia which is enduring its worst drought in four decades.
The food crisis is one of the main topics on the agenda of African leaders at the summit.
The others are a continent-wide free trade deal and Africa’s many conflicts. It appears that none of these issues will be solved anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the global financial system is “dysfunctional and unfair” and is “failing developing countries”, UN Secretary General António Guterres has said at the opening of the annual African Union leaders’ summit.
In a stinging rebuke he said that countries are being “left in the lurch” as they are denied debt relief and being charged “extortionate interest rates”, he told his audience in Ethiopia.
“As a result, vital systems are starved of investment.”
He called for a total rethink of the “global financial architecture” that made decisions that reflected the “needs of developing countries”.
Mr Guterres also said he was deeply concerned about a rise in violence in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In addition, he talked about climate change and the war in Ukraine, saying Africa was suffering the effects of crises it had not created.
Also speaking at the start of the summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had a similar message.
“Nearly all of us want to put our economies back on a growth trajectory but this will not happen without sufficient restructuring to make our external debt sustainable,” the Reuters news agency quotes him as saying
