UN Agency Says 49,000 Children Face Starvation Due to Boko Haram

Tope Alake

At least 49,000 children are at risk of dying from starvation in Nigeria’s northeast, which has been ravaged by Boko Haram’s Islamist insurgency, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

These are among 244,000 children identified to be suffering from severe malnutrition in the northeastern state of Borno, the agency known as Unicef, said in a statement Tuesday on its website.

“Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly,” Manuel Fontaine, Unicef regional director for western and central Africa, who just returned from a visit to Borno state, said in the statement.

Tens of thousands of people have died in the seven-year violent campaign by the Boko Haram Islamist group to impose its version of Shariah, or Islamic law, on Africa’s most populous country of about 180 million people.

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