According to the United Nations, $396 million is urgently required to end a humanitarian crisis in the nation’s North East.
If nothing is done immediately to address the issue, only roughly 300,000 of the 4.3 million at-risk individuals in need of food assistance in the North East will receive aid, the UN lamented.
In a statement that was made public, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that $396 million was urgently needed to scale up humanitarian action in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states in order to prevent a widespread hunger and malnutrition crisis in north-east Nigeria from becoming fully catastrophic.
It is predicted that two million children under the age of five will likely go hungry this year.
Mr. Matthias Schmale, the Nigerian humanitarian coordinator, said that no one should have to deal with this and regretted that, unless finance and resources are promptly mobilized, millions of people in the BAY states who are food insecure may have to live with this awful reality.
“More than half a million people may face emergency levels of food insecurity with extremely high rates of acute malnutrition and cases of mortality if there is no rapid and significant scale-up of humanitarian assistance.
“This is the most immediate and life-threatening form of malnutrition.
Some 700,000 children are at risk of severe acute malnutrition, meaning that they are 11 times more likely to die compared to well-nourished children.
“They need immediate action to survive.
“The deepening food crisis and worrying malnutrition levels are the result of years of protracted conflict and insecurity, which continue to prevent more than two million people from returning home.
“A combination of fuel and food inflation, a naira cash crisis earlier in the year, and climate shocks such as the record floods in Nigeria in 2022 are among factors that have worsened the crisis.”
