Nigeria

Amid the worst malnutrition crisis to hit north-east Nigeria in five years, the United Nations relief chief and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, has released $6 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to respond to the humanitarian crisis in the region. In a statement on Monday, Fletcher stressed the need to deliver food to those in urgent need and establish systems to mitigate the risk of future crises.

The humanitarian organization International Rescue Committee (IRC) has expressed concern about the humanitarian impact of growing insecurity in northwest Nigeria due to conflict between various armed groups. In Zamfara and Sokoto states, armed attacks in March and April have displaced more than 10,000 people and killed at least 92, while many others have been kidnapped, the IRC said.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Nigerian government officials have launched an appeal for US$910 million to address the escalating humanitarian crisis in the north-eastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY states), where a total of 7.8 million people are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance.

An additional one million children in Nigeria will suffer from acute malnutrition by April next year unless urgent action is taken, as extreme flooding, escalating violence and rampant food shortages fuel a deepening hunger crisis, the international humanitarian organization Save the Children warned on Tuesday. Nigeria is already the country with the highest absolute number of people facing severe acute food insecurity in the world.

Armed groups have killed at least 160 people in central Nigeria over the weekend in a series of attacks on villages, according to media reports. Media outlets reported that bandit groups launched well-coordinated attacks that started in the night of Saturday and continued into Monday against at least 20 different communities in Plateau State, injuring more than 300 people.

With half a million people one step away from famine in north-eastern Nigeria, UN humanitarian agencies have sounded the alarm bell on Wednesday at a briefing in Geneva asking for urgently needed funding to provide life-saving operations. 700,000 children under the age of five years are at risk of life-threatening severe acute malnutrition, a number which has doubled compared to last year.

More than 2.5 million people in Nigeria are in need of humanitarian assistance and at increased risk of waterborne diseases, drowning and malnutrition due to the most severe flooding in the past decade, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has warned in a statement Friday. Over 1.5 million children are among those affected by the floods.

As the level of humanitarian support available to respond to the critical needs of people in northern Nigeria dramatically declines, a neglected humanitarian crisis persists in the northwest, with catastrophic levels of malnutrition and recurrent outbreaks of preventable diseases, according to the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF). In a statement Monday, MSF warned that despite the severity of the crisis, the situation is largely being ignored by donors and aid agencies.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that floods in the Sahel and other parts of West and Central Africa have reached catastrophic levels, affecting more than 5 million people in 16 countries so far this year. Chad, Niger and Nigeria are among the hardest hit, accounting for more than 80 percent of those impacted.

Persistent heavy rains and severe flooding have hit several countries in the Sahel, affecting millions of people and displacing hundreds of thousands, most recently in northeastern Nigeria. The extreme weather has also exacerbated existing humanitarian crises in Chad, Cameroon, Mali and Niger. Aid agencies are urgently calling for increased international support to reach the most vulnerable.

Numerous countries around the world have been hit by torrential rains, flash floods, river flooding, and other large-scale flooding events that have submerged vast areas of land, caused devastation, affected millions of people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and claimed hundreds of lives. Although the rainy season is still underway in many regions of the Northern Hemisphere, the magnitude of the ongoing natural disasters points to the effects of the climate crisis and the La Niña phenomenon.

Amid escalating violence and intensifying humanitarian needs across Colombia, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) warned on Friday that years of progress in protecting and integrating displaced populations are at risk of being lost, and the most vulnerable will pay the highest price. UNHCR said refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) may be forced to move again in search of safety and stability, while returnees will not find conditions to resettle.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Friday that without urgent funding, life-saving food aid in Africa's Sahel region will come to a halt in April 2025. The warning comes as the lean season, the period between harvests when hunger peaks, is expected to arrive earlier than usual across the region this year. Millions of children, women and men, including refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), continue to rely on WFP food assistance to survive.

Nearly 55 million people in West and Central Africa will struggle to feed themselves during the lean season between June and August 2024, according to a March 2023 food security analysis. In a joint statement on Friday, UN humanitarian agencies warned that the number of people who are food insecure in the Sahel and beyond has increased by four million compared to the November 2023 forecast and has quadrupled in the last five years.

While the world's farmers produce more than enough food to feed the planet's 8 billion people, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said "hunger and malnutrition are a fact of life" for billions, as 2.8 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.  In a message ahead of Wednesday's World Food Day, Guterres said 733 million people worldwide lack food because of "conflict, marginalization, climate change, poverty and economic downturns.