UNICEF said that as more areas in the northeast become accessible to humanitarian assistance, the extent of the nutrition crisis affecting children is becoming even more apparent.

The UN children’s agency therefore urged all partners to join the humanitarian response and donors to urgently provide resources.

“Out of the 244,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno, an estimated 49,000 children – almost 1 in 5 – will die if they are not reached with treatment.

“Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Regional Director for Western and Central Africa, who just returned from a visit to Borno state.

“We need all partners and donors to step forward to prevent any more children from dying. No one can take on a crisis of this scale alone.”

While visiting newly accessible sites, previously under Boko Haram control, Fontaine witnessed destroyed towns accommodating displaced people, families with little access to adequate sanitation, water or food, and thousands of frail children in desperate need of help.

“There are two million people we are still not able to reach in Borno state, which means that the true scope of this crisis has yet to be revealed to the world,” Fontaine said.

“There are organizations on the ground doing great work, but none of us are able to work at the scale and quality that we need. We must all scale up.”

UNICEF is working with partners to screen and treat children for malnutrition and improve access to water and sanitation. UNICEF’s humanitarian response also includes providing medical care, immunization, education and psychological support to the children affected by the violence.

In early 2016, UNICEF appealed for $55.5 million to respond to the humanitarian crisis in north-east Nigeria, but has so far only received $23 million – 41 percent. As the children’s agency gains access to new areas with vast humanitarian needs in the coming weeks, it expects the appeal to increase significantly.

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In its State of the World’s Children report released Tuesday, UNICEF further warned that 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030, the target date for the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG.

The report, UNICEF’s annual flagship report, paints a stark picture of what is in store for the world’s poorest children if governments, donors, businesses and international organizations do not accelerate efforts to address their needs.

“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures – by fueling intergenerational cycles of disadvantage, it imperils the future of their societies,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

“We have a choice: Invest in these children now or allow our world to become still more unequal and divided.”

The report notes that significant progress has been made in saving children’s lives, getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty. Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, and the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half what it was in the 1990s.

But this progress has been neither even nor fair, the report says. The poorest children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday and to be chronically malnourished than the richest.

Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost 3 times more likely to die before they are 5 than those born to mothers with a secondary education. And girls from the poorest households are twice as likely to marry as children than girls from the wealthiest households.

Nowhere is the outlook grimmer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where at least 247 million children – or 2 in 3 – live in multidimensional poverty, deprived of what they need to survive and develop, and where nearly 60 per cent of 20- to 24-year-olds from the poorest fifth of the population have had less than four years of schooling. At current trends, the report projects, by 2030, sub-Saharan Africa will account for:

* Nearly half of the 69 million children who will die before their fifth birthday from mostly preventable causes;

* More than half of the 60 million children of primary school age who will still be out of school; and

* Nine out of 10 children living in extreme poverty.

Although education plays a unique role in levelling the playing field for children, the report said that the number of children who do not attend school has increased since 2011, and a significant proportion of those who do go to school are not learning.

About 124 million children today do not go to primary- and lower-secondary school, and almost 2 in 5 who do finish primary school have not learned how to read, write or do simple arithmetic.

The report points to evidence that investing in the most vulnerable children can yield immediate and long-term benefits. Cash transfers, for example, have been shown to help children stay in school longer and advance to higher levels of education.

On average, each additional year of education a child receives increases his or her adult earnings by about 10 per cent. And for each additional year of schooling completed, on average, by young adults in a country, that country’s poverty rates fall by nine per cent.

Inequity is neither inevitable, nor insurmountable, the report argues. Better data on the most vulnerable children, integrated solutions to the challenges children face, innovative ways to address old problems, more equitable investment and increased involvement by communities – all these measures can help level the playing field for children.

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The town of Bama has been accessible to humanitarian assistance since March 2016 and UNICEF, working with our partners on the ground, has been working in Bama since then, primarily in the IDP camp in the town that houses approximately 25,000 people who have been displaced by the conflict. Of these, 15,000 are children.

Doune Porter, UNICEF’s Chief of Communication officer, said in a statement that “We are seeing an average of 140 outpatients a day: providing treatment primarily for malaria, respiratory infections and diarrhoea; screening for malnutrition and treating severely malnourished children, as well as providing Vitamin A, micronutrient supplements and deworming tablets.

“Most recent data available from the team on the ground, which does not have regular means of communication, show that during the period 3 April – 31 May 2016, 323 children were admitted for treatment for Severe Acute Malnutrition – an average of six new cases per day.”

Doune Porter said the agency has repaired and upgraded five boreholes in Bama, providing 10-12 litres of water per day per person in the IDP camp.

In the following days, he says construction work would begin on 150 latrines, just as it has also identified 3,000 children who have become separated from their families and have started to register children with the aim of trying to trace their families.

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The report, Beyond Chibok, stated that the number of children involved in ‘suicide’ attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger has risen sharply over the past year, from four in 2014 to 44 in 2015.

The data further revealed that more than 75 per cent of the children involved in the attacks are girls.

“Let us be clear: these children are victims, not perpetrators. Deceiving children and forcing them to carry out deadly acts has been one of the most horrific aspects of the violence in Nigeria and in neighbouring countries,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa.

Released two years after the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, the report Beyond Chibok shows alarming trends in four countries affected by Boko Haram over the past two years.

Between January 2014 and February 2016, Cameroon recorded the highest number of suicide attacks involving children 21, followed by Nigeria with 17 and Chad with two.

The report further stated that over the past two years, nearly one in five suicide bombers was a child and three quarters of these children were girls. Last year, children were used in one out of two attacks in Cameroon, one out of eight in Chad, and one out of seven in Nigeria.

Last year, the report said, for the first time, ‘suicide’ bombing attacks in general spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, with the frequency of all suicide bombings increased from 32 in 2014 to 151 last year. In 2015, 89 of these attacks were carried out in Nigeria, 39 in Cameroon, 16 in Chad and seven in Niger.

The report revealed that the calculated use of children who may have been coerced into carrying bombs, has created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that has devastating consequences for girls who have survived captivity and sexual violence by Boko Haram in North East Nigeria.

Children who escaped from, or were released by, armed groups are often seen as potential security threats, as shown in recent research by UNICEF and International Alert. Children born as a result of sexual violence also encounter stigma and discrimination in their villages, host communities, and in camps for internally displaced persons.

“As ‘suicide’ attacks involving children become commonplace, some communities are starting to see children as threats to their safety,” said Fontaine. “This suspicion towards children can have destructive consequences; how can a community rebuild itself when it is casting out its own sisters, daughters and mothers?”

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The number of children missing out on their education due to the conflict adds to the estimated 11 million children of primary school age who were already out of school in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger before the onset of the crisis.

“It’s a staggering number. The conflict has been a huge blow for education in the region, and violence has kept many children out of the classroom for more than a year, putting them at risk of dropping out of school altogether,” says Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s West and Central Africa Regional Director.

Across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, over 2,000 schools remain closed due to the conflict – some of them for more than a year – and hundreds have been attacked, looted or set on fire. In far north Cameroon, only one out of the 135 schools closed in 2014 has re-opened this year.

In northeastern Nigeria, UNICEF has supported 170,000 children back into education in the safer areas of the three states most affected by the conflict, where the majority of schools have been able to re-open.

However, many classrooms are severely overcrowded as some school buildings are still being used to house the large numbers of displaced persons seeking shelter from the conflict.

In these areas, some displaced teachers, who themselves have fled the fighting, are involved in the schooling and classes are often given on a “double shift” basis to help more children attend school.

In other areas, however, insecurity, fear of violence and attacks are preventing many teachers from resuming classes and discouraging parents from sending their children back to school.

In Nigeria alone, approximately 600 teachers have been killed since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency.

“The challenge we face is to keep children safe without interrupting their schooling. Schools have been targets of attack, so children are scared to go back to the classroom; yet the longer they stay out of school, the greater the risks of being abused, abducted and recruited by armed groups,” said Fontaine.

Together with governments, NGOs and other partners, UNICEF has set up temporary learning spaces, renovated and expanded schools, reaching 67,000 children.

In addition, UNICEF has trained teachers on psychosocial support and provided more than 132,000 children uprooted by conflict with learning materials, including in local schools hosting displaced students.

However, security constraints and funding shortfalls hinder access to education services and the delivery of emergency learning materials.

So far, UNICEF has received 44 per cent of the funding required in 2015 to respond to the humanitarian needs of children in Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad.

In 2016, UNICEF will need nearly $23 million to provide access to education for children affected by conflicts in the four countries, most of whom live around the Lake Chad region.

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The nutritionist, who conducted a team of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) functionaries and media chiefs round the special ward for the management of malnourished children in the Calabar general hospital on Thursday, said that malnourishment is rampant in Nigeria also because of wide spread lack of education in that direction.

The UNICEF functionaries, including its Communication specialist, Geoffrey Njoku and the Coordinator of the African Centre for Media and Information Literacy, Chido Onuma, as well as publishers of Online media and senior correspondents of the major newspapers, television and radio stations across the country, were in Calabar for a two-day dialogue on children malnutrition and its effect on the socio-economy of the country.

Dr. Adie said that Cross River state has taken several positive measures to contain the growing cases of malnutrition, adding that from an average of 42 cases, the cases are being reduced and would soon hit zero point.

One of such measures, she said, is the investment in regular screening of mothers and the new born babies through the state’s maternal and new born child health programme, adding that the state has been able to identify and control the rate of malnutrition in children through such exercise.

“As its contribution to eradicating this silent health crisis in children, Cross River State government has been settling all the medical bills and feeding of the patients, including their mothers.”

She disclosed that the state government has also embarked on procurement of F75 and F100 food supplements to support the nutritional needs of the affected children at the cost which the state government has been bearing.

The UNICEF Communication Specialist, Njoku thanked Dr. Adie and the state government for the proactive action towards lessening the effect of malnutrition in the state, even as he called on the media practitioners to redouble their efforts in the campaign against malnutrition which he said has a long-term capacity to retard the socio-economic growth of the country.

He also appealed to donor agencies across the world to continue to support the international children agency to enable it tackle the silent health crisis.

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The international donor agency which began a two-day workshop Wednesday in Calabar, Cross River state for media executives and health correspondents of many Nigerian media organisations, stressed that unless something urgent is done, malnutrition would continue to take its toll on the nation’s children.

The workshop, tagged: #StopChildMalnutritionInNigeria, was coordinated by the UNICEF’s Communication Specialist, Geoffrey Njoku with top officials of the federal and Cross River ministries of health in attendance.

Speaking on the nutritional situation in Nigeria and its impact on children, the Chief Nutritionist of the UNICEF, Arjan de Wagt said that most of the children die of malnutrition within their first 1000 days on earth, describing the period as “window period.”

Wagt said that the first 1000 days of a child are so important that they determine not only the child’s growth but also his entire health status throughout the life, up to old age.

The Chief Nutritionist stressed that malnutrition affects not only the poor but also some wealthy ones, adding that part of the effects of the malnutrition is obesity.

“Whenever we talk about malnutrition, the only thing that comes to the mind is that it is for the poor uneducated rural people who have less to eat. But malnutrition also includes eating wrong food or unbalanced diet. It is about lack of knowledge of the food we eat and not lack of food.”

Wagt said that the chief cause of malnutrition is lack of exclusive breast feeding of the child in the first six months of his birth, insisting that breast milk is made strictly for the babies and they must not be denied of it.

According to him, children that are not well-fed and properly cared for usually experience stunted growth, over weight, micro nutrient deficiency and are generally prone to life threatening diseases.

The speakers at the workshop, including. Dr. Chris Osa Isokpunwu of the Federal Ministry of Health, the Coordinator of African Centre for Media and Information Literacy, Chido Onuma called on the media to be in the forefront for advocacy on behavioural change amongst Nigeria to reverse the trend.

Though, UNICEF announced that through its numerous interventions, about 208,000 lives of mal-nourished children have been saved in the last 12 months, the speakers stressed the need for more financial assistance from donor agencies to increase the number of those it could save from the dangerous effect of malnutrition to one million per annum.

The speakers stressed the importance of people regularly going for de-worming and for them to observe behavioural change as well as take other positive measures to stem the tide of death from malnutrition.

They appealed to media organisations to join in the crusade against malnutrition so that more lives could be saved and to bring a new way of dieting to ensure proper nutrition into the lives of Nigerians.

The workshop, which drew no fewer than 50 journalists, including online publishers, editors, senior correspondents from newspapers, television and radio stations, ends tomorrow, Thursday.

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