The Maiduguri floods have now pushed three million children out of school, and they are now at heightened risk of child marriage and other protection risks, highlighting the need for accountability concerning relief funds received for interventions.
Development Diaries reports that more than 400,000 people have been uprooted from their homes across the state and tens of thousands of children are crammed into the buildings that have avoided damage, such as schools, as well as displacement camps, according to Save the Children.
Heavy rains, which led to a breach in Alau Dam, submerged half of the entire city of Maiduguri, with many of those affected having already been forced to move several times due to years of armed conflict, kidnappings and the impacts of climate change.
Now that schools have been closed across the entire state, millions will be exposed to a higher risk of child labour, early marriage and other forms of abuse, and are more likely to be trapped in a cycle of poverty in the long term.
‘This is a crisis upon a crisis – in an area where the creeping impacts of climate change were already putting food and clean water out of reach and malnutrition and disease was already rife among children’, Country Director of Save the Children in Nigeria, Duncan Harvey, said in a statement.
‘I have worked in the humanitarian sector for over 20 years and still, what I saw in Maiduguri shocked me to my core. Hundreds of thousands of children are crammed side by side in camps with no clean water, sanitation, food or health care’.
So far, the Borno State government has announced receiving over N12 billion in cash and material donations to aid victims of the flood disaster.
The state government must become more transparent and accountable to close the citizens’ trust gap by effectively utilising ecological funds.
Already, there are questions of accountability for the utilisation of the ecological funds to the state, receiving more funds for flood victims requires stricter accountability measures for the state government.
Development Diaries, therefore, calls on the Borno State government to ensure full transparency and accountability for the utilisation of donations received for flood intervention measures.
Source: Save the Children
Photo source: Vanguard
