the first time, it said a quarter of the worldwide appeal would go towards educating children in emergencies, focusing on 5 million children affected by the Syrian civil war, which is now in its fifth year.

In North Korea, Unicef said severe drought during 2015 in four agricultural provinces led to a 20% reduction in crop production compared with 2014.

“The impact of this will continue into 2016. Cereal rations were reduced, impacting the nutritional and health status of women and children,” it said in a statement.

International aid appeals for North Korea are often severely underfunded as foreign governments try to pressure Pyongyang to curtail its nuclear ambitions.

Aid workers warn that whenever North Korea conducts nuclear weapon trials – such as the hydrogen bomb test this month – foreign fundsfunding, our supplies of essential medicines will start running out in March, nutrition supplies will be depleted by mid-year, and our highly successful immunisation programme will run out of basic vaccines before the year’s end.”

In its global 2016 appeal, the bulk of the funds sought would provide life-saving aid needed for Syria and the resultant refugee crisis in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, Unicef said.

Yemen's humanitarian crisis leaves a million people in dire straits – in pictures Read more

It called for £126m for children in Yemen, where 10 million children are in urgent need of humanitarian aid, and said it needed £17.9m to help children in Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, and where a political crisis has led to street fighting and mass