Abuja, Nigeria/New York, July 3, 2023—A malnutrition crisis is escalating in northwest Nigeria, where attacks by armed groups are affecting food supplies, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today, warning that the current humanitarian response is insufficient to avert a potential catastrophe in the coming months.
Widespread violence has exacerbated the region’s malnutrition crisis. Armed groups regularly raid towns, loot property and kidnap local people for ransom. More than 500,000 people have fled their homes in the states of Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina and Kano, according to international estimates. Others have stayed but are unable to access their farms or places of work due to the worsening insecurity.
"People don’t have access to their lands anymore, which means they have less food," said Froukje Pelsma, MSF's former head of mission in Nigeria. "In general, health care workers leave the area because it's too dangerous. We also see that with climate change, there are more droughts, but also more flooding, which has a big impact on the way people can work with the land."
MSF urges all aid organizations working in Nigeria to scale up their humanitarian response, and is calling on the Nigerian government and local health authorities to act now to prevent a catastrophic loss of life in the months ahead.
MSF has increased its response to malnutrition in the region, which was already one of MSF's largest malnutrition responses worldwide. Currently, MSF manages 10 inpatient therapeutic feeding centers and 35 outpatient centers across Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, and Zamfara states. From January to May 2023, MSF teams in northwest Nigeria provided inpatient care to 10,200 severely malnourished children with medical complications and admitted 51,000 children to its outpatient feeding programs. Inpatient admissions were 26 percent higher than in the same period in 2022—numbers that were already higher than ever before.
