Around the world, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams see that the communities least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change are those whose lives and health are most impacted. This is the stark reality in Chad, a country straddling Africa’s Sahel region where people are already suffering from chronic health crises made worse by environmental factors. MSF has been working here for more than 40 years in response to regular malnutrition emergencies, repeated epidemics, and some of the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality in the world.
In the last decade, Chad has been losing precious farming and pasture lands to the expanding Saharan desert and Sahelian zone. More than 75 percent of people here live in remote areas and rely on agriculture for their livelihood, making them extremely vulnerable to hotter temperatures and variable rainfalls. These communities now face a lack of water, dwindling harvests, and scarce food supplies. People in Chad already struggle to make it through the annual “hunger gap,” when food stocks from the previous harvest run out. Conditions seem to be going from bad to worse.
“There is some fear that the worst is yet to come, that the hunger gap will start earlier than usual, and that it could be longer and more severe,” said Ibrahim Barrie, MSF’s medical team leader in Hadjer Lamis province, in the southwest. “It’s a continuous crisis. At the same time, funding for nutrition and food security in Chad has gone down. We need a better aid response to prevent children from dying from malnutrition.”
MSF is responding to people’s most critical health needs with therapeutic feeding centers and malnutrition programs in several areas of southern Chad. We also train community health workers, improve access to maternal care, provide pediatric health care, and run seasonal malaria chemoprevention campaigns to reduce the incidence of severe malaria during the rainy season.
Last September, MSF launched a project in Hadjer Lamis after being alerted to high rates of malnutrition. In the first nine months of MSF’s response, our teams treated 15,956 people for severe acute malnutrition. Among them, 837 children were admitted to the inpatient therapeutic feeding center for additional care. Khadidja Iba had to walk for two hours to bring her youngest child, nine-month-old Sara, for follow-up care at MSF’s nutrition program in Massakory, the provincial capital. After an assessment with MSF’s health staff, Khadidja received a week’s supply of Plumpy’Nut, a high-energy peanut paste used to treat malnutrition. She has enough to feed her baby until the next assessment, but she also has five other children to take care of at home.
“There was very little rain last year. It was worse than any year I remember,” said Khadidja. “We harvested hardly anything. We need to buy vegetables at the market, but everything costs almost double now. We don’t have enough to eat.”
On top of existing problems, the war in Ukraine and the disruption of global agricultural exports are contributing to a worsening crisis this year.
