The World Food Programme published its Rwanda country brief in June. The share of refugees in the country classified as highly vulnerable rose to 76 percent in December 2025, up from 40 percent in mid-2024. WFP gives the cause in the next line: continued underfunding has forced reduced assistance to 50 percent since April 2025, increasing food and nutrition vulnerability as well as protection risks. It says it needs USD 13.1 million to sustain operations to November 2026, USD 10.2 million of that urgently, simply to keep food assistance running.
The brief doesn’t count refugees with disabilities separately, so there’s no figure here for how many of that 76 percent they are. What it records instead is what changed around them. Assistance was halved, and WFP ties that directly to rising food and nutrition vulnerability and to rising protection risks, meaning the risk of violence, theft and exploitation. In the same brief, WFP describes standing ready to support Rwanda’s Ebola preparedness with logistics, telecommunications equipment and connectivity in border and remote areas.
That figure measures the response, not the people. Nobody became more vulnerable as a person between mid-2024 and last December. The assistance was cut, so the count went up. Less on the ground doesn’t mean no help exists, though. The international agencies are still there, and so are the local organisations and the neighbours who bring food round or drive someone to a clinic. What goes is the person whose job was to come and find you. Large aid organisations pay caseworkers to go into camps and settlements and find refugees with disabilities. That worker has to be recruited, trained, insured and housed, all before a single person with a disability has been identified and supported. Staff are the expensive part, so staff are what a funding cut removes first. Credit on a phone costs no salary, and it puts a person with a disability on the calling end rather than waiting to be found. WFP counts connectivity as response infrastructure when it plans for its own operations, and we believe it is infrastructure for the person at the other end too.
Calling for Help exists to close that gap. Digital inequality leaves refugees with disabilities cut off from help that already exists, so we send free mobile top-ups every month and the person uses them to reach whoever is best placed to help — a caseworker, a clinic, a local organisation, their own family.
We believe it is the most cost-effective humanitarian aid there is. Nobody has to be employed to find them and nobody has to travel: the credit arrives on the number they already use, once they have passed AI-based identity and anti-fraud checks. The pilot has a limited number of places while we find out what it changes.
If you have a disability and are living as a refugee, or you support someone who is, apply to the pilot. To follow what we find, join the newsletter.