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ACT Alliance Alert: Humanitarian Crisis in Nigeria

by Arnold Ambundo | https://twitter.com/actalliance | ACT Alliance - Switzerland
Friday, 4 November 2016 14:50 GMT

* Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Nairobi, 3 November 2016

1. Brief description of the emergency and impact
The impacts of the ongoing insurgency attacks by Boko Haram on both lives and properties in the North East states of Nigeria have left many in fear, displaced millions of people, while hundreds of thousands have lost their livelihoods and are facing serious starvation. Total number of food insecure people in Nigeria is 14.6 million; 7.3M of these are in Adamawa, Borno & Yobe where CA has operations - out of which 3 M are in urgent need of food assistance. Over 2.5 M children are malnourished, 2.5 M internally displaced and only 30% of the total needs are currently met. The situation is escalating with the renewed government offensive against Boko Haram in the North East. This will lead to further displacements compounding an already dire humanitarian situation.

2. Why is an ACT response needed?
Report by Action Against Hunger (ACF) of August 2016, says 7 to 9 children die every one hour from malnutrition. Persons in displaced camps and host communities are living in dire conditions with little or no food, water, without shelter, livelihood or protection. The crisis is affecting several segments of the population including women and children in the North East states of Nigeria.  It is one of the worst crises in the world but is currently underfunded and under reported. The critical needs includes food, livelihood support, water, shelter, health services, education and protection.

3. National and international response
Due to the humanitarian crisis in the North East, there have been coordination meetings between the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), Security agencies, Local NGOs and International NGOs (Christian Aid, MSF, Action Against Hunger and International Rescue Committee) UN agencies and ICRC among others working in different sectors and clusters to meet the needs of persons affected by the insurgency. However, despite several efforts by INGOs and government there are still huge funding and resource gaps in all the sectors. For instance, food assistance is done as one-off distribution for some INGOs, while some IDPS have not received any form of assistance in the past one year.

4. ACT Alliance response
There have not been any coordinated ACT alliance responses in Nigeria, however Christian Aid has provided assistance in some communities and camps in the three most affected states by providing Food and Non-food items,  provision of WASH facilities such as water points, toilets, bathrooms, drainage channels, protection (child protection, trauma counselling) and specially made Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTF) for children suffering from medium and severe acute malnutrition as well as offer referral services for severe Acute Malnutrition cases.

5. Planned activities
Christian Aid plans to scale up efforts in the three states of Adamawa, Borno and Gombe around Livelihood support through provision of agricultural inputs to support IDP returnees in host communities whilst still providing emergency relief in host communities in Borno where there is high need for food and livelihood, water, shelter and protection issues, aiming to reach about 50,000 households. In addition, Christian Aid plans to continue food and NFI distribution using cash based programming, while providing water and other WASH facilities to communities/IDPs in need.

6. Constraints
The major constraints include the high insecurity in the North East considering activities of both insurgents as well as the security forces. Currently, the funding gaps and limited financial and human resources are limiting Christian Aid’s response rate, hence the reason for this alert. Christian Aid is planning to raise additional income to respond to this crisis.

Forum/Member Contact information: Usie Charles, Country Director Christian Aid;
Communication Contact information: CUsie@christian-aid.org; +2348034041120

Any funding indication or pledge should be communicated to the Head of Finance and Administration, Line Hempel (Line.Hempel@actalliance.org) with copy to Arnold Ambundo
(Arnold.Ambundo@actalliance.org)


For further information please contact:

ACT Regional Representative – Africa, Gezahegn K. Gebrehana (gkg@actalliance.org)

ACT website address: http://www.actalliance.org

 

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