An international medical charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said extraordinarily high numbers of children were suffering from acute malnutrition in north-western Nigeria.
MSF says there is a catastrophic health crisis having treated about 100,000 children with varying levels of nutritional deficiencies since the beginning of 2022. At the moment, 17,000 require hospital care.
Since the beginning of 2022, MSF teams have witnessed extraordinarily high numbers of children with malnutrition in MSF’s programs located in five states across northwest Nigeria. Multiple factors have led to a sharp rise in malnutrition in the region over the last year.
MSF Country representative in Nigeria, Dr. Simba Tirima, MSF said “With increasing insecurity, climate change, and global inflation of food prices in a post-pandemic world, we can only imagine this crisis getting worse.”
“The Nigerian authorities need support to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. This must include emergency humanitarian funding now for organizations able to respond and a commitment to include northwest Nigeria in the UN’s humanitarian response plan for 2023,” he added.
The charity said the humanitarian response had been deficient , with greater attention focused on north-eastern Nigeria, where there has been a long-running insurgency.