More than 600 malnourished children have died in northern Nigeria in six months after failing to receive proper care as foreign aid dries up, a medical charity has said.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said northern Nigeria, which already is struggling with insurgency and banditry, is “currently facing an alarming malnutrition crisis.”
In the first half of this year, its teams treated nearly 70,000 children for malnutrition in Katsina state, nearly 10,000 of whom had to be hospitalized.
Photo: Reuters
During the same period, cases of nutritional oedema — the most severe and deadly form of malnutrition among children — jumped 208 percent from the same period last year.
“Unfortunately, 652 children have already died in our facilities since the beginning of 2025 due to a lack of timely access to care,” the charity, which is known by its French initials, said in a statement released on Friday.
Huge cuts in foreign aid sparked by US President Donald Trump’s decision to slash spending overseas have combined with spiking living costs and a surge in jihadist attacks to create a dire situation in northern Nigeria.
Ahmed Aldikhari, MSF’s country representative in Nigeria, said the cuts from the US — but also the UK and the EU — were hampering treatment and care for malnourished children.
“The true scale of the crisis exceeds all predictions,” he said.
An MSF survey of 750 mothers showed that more than half of them were “acutely malnourished, including 13 percent with severe acute malnutrition.”
Katsina state nutrition officer Abdulhadi Abdulkadir acknowledged the severity of malnutrition in the state, but said the numbers released by the medical charity might be “too high compared to reality” and had not been validated by his administration.
“Yes, definitely there are deaths as a result of malnutrition,” he said, promising to provide official figures next week.
The MSF figures cover the entire north of the country which includes more than a dozen states.
Abdulkadir said the northern parts of his state, bordering Niger and straddling the semi desert Sahel region, have the most severe malnutrition because food production is limited by the harsh climate.
Food production in the fertile south of the state is being hampered by criminal gangs called bandits who raid villages, making farming dangerous, he said.
“This has aggravated the issue of malnutrition,” he added.
Criminal gangs have spread throughout the country, targeting rural areas with kidnappings for ransom.
The Katsina state government provided 500 million naira (US$327,367) toward nutrition programs last year and has doubled the amount this year, Abdulkadir said.
Across the country of about 230 million people, a record nearly 31 million face acute hunger, UN World Food Programme (WFP)in Nigeria country director David Stevenson said.
The WFP last week said that it would be forced to suspend all emergency food and nutrition aid for 1.3 million people in northeast Nigeria at the end of this month due to critical funding shortfalls.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS