Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The innocent victims

Just under a quarter of a million children in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Borno, where an insurgency waged by jihadists Boko Haram has disrupted trade and healthcare, suffer from life-threatening malnourishment, UNICEF said on Tuesday. The UN children’s agency said the extent of the nutrition problems faced by children in Borno had become clearer as a result of more areas in the northeast becoming accessible to humanitarian assistance. UNICEF said that out of the 244,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno this year, around one in five will die if they do not receive treatment.

“Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly,” Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for Western and Central African warned. “There are two million people we are still not able to reach in Borno state, which means that the true scope of this crisis has yet to be revealed to the world.” 


The Islamist group Boko Haram’s seven-year rebellion has left 20,000 people dead and more than two million displaced.

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