More than 1.4 million children have been displaced by Boko Haram extremists operating in Nigeria’s Lake Chad region, but humanitarian funding for the crisis continues to fall short, the United Nations said yesterday Friday.
“With more refugees and not enough resources, our ability to deliver life-saving assistance on the ground is now seriously compromised,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s regional director for West and Central Africa.
UNICEF has received less than a third of the $50.3 million it says it needs for humanitarian response across the region. And the number of displaced only continues to grow.
President Muhammadu Buhari has accorded the defeat of Boko Haram a top priority for his administration. The vast majority of the displaced children — 1.2 million of the total 1.4 million — are Nigerian, and were uprooted in the past five months, UNICEF said. More than half of the Nigerians are under the age of 5.
An estimated 265,000 displaced children are from Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, who have been uprooted as the extremists continue to operate across borders. A multinational task force backed by all four countries, with support from Benin, is working to battle Boko Haram, which upped its extremist offensive in the past two years as it razed villages and kidnapped children from their schools.
Children who escape before they are recruited as soldiers, wives, or suicide bombers, are often left to fend for themselves in precarious conditions. UNICEF reported that 208,000 remain out of school and 83,000 do not have access to clean water. On top of that, 124,000 have not been vaccinated for measles, despite numerous outbreaks of the disease in camps for the displaced.
And according to Fontaine, these shortfalls are a direct result of humanitarian funding shortages in the region. “Without additional support, hundreds of thousands of children in need will lack access to basic health care, safe drinking water and education,” he said.
