North East Nigeria: Children’s lives and futures at risk

Children in North East Nigeria are paying the heaviest price for seven years of brutal insurgency, coupled with months of intensified fighting between insurgents and the Nigerian government. Violence has forced a million children to flee their homes and schools. Many have seen friends and family killed, or been attacked and injured themselves. As new areas controlled by the Nigerian military have become more accessible, the true and devastating scale of the need is becoming clear. And in these newly accessible areas, security risks mean NGOs cannot reach all of those in need, meaning the true scale may be even higher. Even when out of reach of the fighting, children’s lives and futures are being lost or compromised by increased poverty, health risks and the collapse of already limited education provision.

What Save the Children describes in this briefing is not a remote future risk. It is a crisis that poses a real and immediate threat to the lives of over 400,000 children. If the world and the Nigerian government fail to act, hunger could claim the lives of over 200 children every day during the course of 2017.