LUANDA, Angola — Facing major food aid cuts, Angolan refugees in the remote Lóvua settlement are turning to beekeeping and small farms as a vital new lifeline, according to aid agencies and a recent Deutsche Welle report. Refugees began arriving in 2017 after fleeing militia violence in Congo’s Kasai region. Dec. 4, 2025.
Bees and fields become a lifeline for Angolan refugees.
In Lóvua, rows of wooden hives and small fields of maize and vegetables now sit beside tents and mudbrick houses, as Angola refugees learn new skills through a livelihoods program run by the World Food Programme, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) and local partners. According to the World Food Programme’s Angola country profile, WFP still provides basic food assistance to about 6,300 Congolese refugees in the settlement, while supporting roughly 1,200 refugees and host-community members with training and equipment for agriculture, beekeeping, and fruit-tree planting.
Those efforts accelerated in late 202. At that time, a beekeeping project in Lóvua delivered a second round of training for 44 participants from both refugee and host families and celebrated its first harvest of organic honey, a small but symbolically important new income source. According to a 2024 WFP news release, a US$900,000 contribution from the United States Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance was designated to fund a year of food for about 6,300 refugees and expand modern farming training to 1,200 of them and 250 members of the surrounding community.
Yet even as honey flows, aid has tightened. WFP’s more recent Angola updates say rations for Lóvua’s refugee households now cover only around 50 per cent of daily kilocalorie needs because of severe funding shortfalls, and ration cuts that began in previous years have been maintained despite new contributions. A mid-2025 WFP feature on shrinking aid for African refugees warned that plans to scale up beekeeping, farming, and potential fish-farming projects in Lunda Norte were being delayed even as food assistance was reduced.
The current squeeze facing Angolan refugees has been building for nearly a decade. In 2017, about 35,000 people fleeing militia violence in Kasai province in the Democratic Republic of Congo streamed across the border into Angola, prompting UNHCR and the government to declare an emergency and create the Lóvua settlement with plots of land for each family, as documented in early UN data and a 2017 Inter Press Service report. Subsequent UNHCR statistics and health assessments suggest that around 9,000 of those refugees now remain in Lunda Norte, roughly 6,000 of them in Lóvua, even as thousands have voluntarily or spontaneously returned home. UNHCR now estimates that Angola hosts more than 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers in total, according to UNHCR’s Angola brief, with the largest single group still originating from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Older reporting shows that ration cuts are not new for Angolan refugees. A 2018 appeal by the Lutheran World Federation described food rations in Lóvua as already cut by 50 per cent, triggering acute food insecurity and water shortages across large sections of the camp. Later global reports on food crises found that many refugee households in Lóvua coped by shrinking meal sizes and eating less often, even when distributions improved, suggesting a long-running pattern of precarious diets that has made each new cut in assistance harder to absorb.
In the Deutsche Welle report, cameras follow families in Lóvua as they sow maize, tend hives, and share the first jars of honey with Angolan neighbours, a small sign that livelihoods projects can strengthen ties with host communities and bolster diets. But aid workers and refugees alike stress that these initiatives cannot fully replace lost rations, especially for elderly people, single mothers and children who cannot easily join cash-earning schemes.
Globally, the World Food Programme has warned that ration cuts are rippling through refugee camps from Bangladesh to Uganda as donors pull back, with food support halved or even suspended in some of the world’s largest settlements. Against that backdrop, Angolan refugees and their hosts are hoping that bees, crops and new skills will at least keep hunger from worsening while they wait to see whether the next appeal for funding will be heard.
