By; MATTHEW UKACHUNWA, Lagos
An increasing number of children across Nigeria and other Africa’s protracted crisis areas will be exposed to severe wasting as the impact of insecurity, Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, poor harvest, the Ukraine war and global food price rises hit vulnerable families.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) gave out the warning, and stressed that the areas to be hit more are from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa.
It tasked African leaders and development partners to combine scale-up humanitarian response with prevention, as the situation worsens for millions of children facing severe wasting.
Wasting is defined as low weight-for-height. It often indicates recent and severe weight loss, although it can also persist for a long time.
UNICEF said, “Global food price rises, low harvests, climate change and conflict mean concerted action is needed by African Heads of State meeting this week in Equatorial Guinea to build long-term resilience.”
“As the ‘lean season’ gets underway in the Sahel and with drought in the Horn of Africa pushing the number of children with severe wasting from 1.7 million to 2 million, the African Union (AU) has called an Extraordinary Humanitarian Summit and Pledging Conference this week in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea,” UNICEF wrote in a news statement dated 25th May 2022.
The United Nations’ agency therefore urged governments and development partners to seize the opportunity of the summit and the AU’s Year of Nutrition to combine scaled-up life-saving responses with prevention and the anticipation of crises through multi-sector investment to build resilience.
“Without scaled-up humanitarian interventions, 1.2 million children will face severe wasting this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with major needs also in Ethiopia (1.2 million), northern Nigeria (671,890), Niger (491,822), Chad (348,160), Somalia (330,000), South Sudan (300,000), Mali (309,821), and Burkina Faso (179,252). On current trends the situation will worsen in the coming months,” the international authority on children’s well-being stated.
“Children in many parts of the region are entering the most difficult period of the year with the next harvest several months away. Children under five are particularly vulnerable to a lack of nutritious food, which can affect long-term growth and development,” Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said. “To really bring about a positive shift, governments and donors need to combine short-term funding with longer-term flexible, multi-year funding so that we can focus on building resilience, so that countries and communities are stronger in the future.”
UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action Plan for the nutrition sector in Africa was less than 50 per cent funded in 2021, a shortfall of $363 million.
On Friday 20 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that 18 million people in Africa’s Sahel region teeter on the edge of severe hunger over the next three months, with food insecurity set to reach its highest level since 2014.Over 16 million people are facing a similar situation in the horn of Africa.
According to UNICEF, the risks are growing for children across the continent at a time when the ready-to-use therapeutic food treatments that save so many children’s lives each year become more costly – projected to increase globally by up to 16 per cent over the next six months due to a sharp rise in the cost of raw ingredients.
“Across the Horn of Africa we are seeing how children are bearing the brunt of the drought. The situation of children with severe wasting is urgent and getting worse,” Mohammed M. Malick Fall, UNICEF Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa, said. “Even as we respond to the humanitarian emergency, it is the right time to invest in local solutions and long-term resilience.”
The previous week, UNICEF published a Child Alert report, Severe wasting: An overlooked child survival emergency, which showed that in the light of rising levels of severe wasting in children and rising costs for life-saving treatment, global financing to save the lives of children suffering from wasting is also under threat.
The African Union has named year 2022 the Year of Nutrition as part of a continent-wide push to tackle malnutrition, which causes significant long-term consequences for physical, mental, cognitive and physiological development.
Without treatment children suffering from severe wasting are 11 times more likely than a well-nourished child to die, UNICEF said, adding that malnutrition is an underlying cause in nearly half of all child under-five deaths.
