ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- Some 370,290 people have been displaced across Ethiopia in the past four months mainly due to conflicts and climate-induced disasters, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) disclosed Friday.
The UNOCHA, which noted that recent key changes in the East African country's humanitarian landscape include new displacements, disease outbreaks as well as an escalation of the desert locust infestation across parts of the country.
"Some 370,290 people were newly displaced in all Ethiopian regions (except the Benishangul-Gumuz region) since November 2019, in which 65 percent of the newly Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) were displaced as a result of conflict," according to a UNOCHA statement.
Noting that majority of the newly IDPs across the East African country to have been affected by recurrent conflicts, the UNOCHA stressed that seasonal floods and drought were also drivers of new displacements in Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous nation with an estimated about 107 million total population.
Two of Ethiopia's largest regional states, Oromia and the Ethiopia Somali, witnessed the highest number of both conflict and climate-induced displacements.
It, however, disclosed that about 275,064 IDPs were also returned to their localities during the stated period.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of IDPs, the East African country also presently hosts more than 735,000 refugees drawn from 26 different nationalities, in which majority of the refugee population in Ethiopia are from its neighboring countries such as South Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan, according to the UNHCR.
