The United Nations (UN) says U.S.$396 million is urgently needed to scale up humanitarian action in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, northeast Nigeria.

Development Diaries reports that more than half a million people already face food insecurity with extremely high rates of acute malnutrition and cases of mortality in the three states.

It is also estimated that two million children under five in the three states are likely to face wasting, the most immediate and life-threatening form of malnutrition, this year.

Some 700,000 children are also at risk of severe acute malnutrition as they are 11 times more likely to die compared to well-nourished children.

‘I have seen firsthand the anguish of mothers fighting for the lives of their malnourished infants in our partner-run stabilization centres. This is a situation no one should have to face’, the Humanitarian Coordinator for Nigeria, Matthias Schmale, said in a statement.

‘I have spoken with children who described going for days without eating enough. Mothers who said their children go to bed crying from hunger. Families struggling to feed their families as they have gone for months without receiving food assistance’.

The deepening food crisis and worrying malnutrition levels are the result of years of protracted conflict and insecurity which continue to prevent more than two million people from returning home.

A combination of fuel and food inflation, a naira cash crisis earlier in the year, and climate shocks (such as the record floods in Nigeria in 2022) are among factors that have worsened the crisis.

If additional funding is not received, humanitarian organisations will only reach about 300,000 of the 4.3 million at-risk people in need of food assistance during the peak of the lean season.

Development Diaries appeals to donors and other development partners to provide additional funding support to the ongoing humanitarian efforts in the country’s northeast to prevent a widespread hunger and malnutrition crisis.

Photo source: UNICEF Ethiopia