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Lying on a small bed next to her mother, 14-month-old Aisha Usman stares blankly, her eyes sunk in their sockets and rib cage visible.
She is the latest arrival at a treatment centre for severely malnourished children in Nigeria’s Northeast, where a long running Islamist insurgency has uprooted millions, forcing farmers to abandon fields and causing food shortages.
Some 1.74 million children under the age of 5 face acute malnutrition in the area, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.
The militant Boko Haram group and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province have been fighting Nigerian security forces in the northeast for over a decade, displacing more than 2 million people and killing hundreds of others, aid agencies say.
At the treatment centre at Damaturu Hospital, in the Yobe state capital, Aisha’s mother Fatima said there were days when her family goes to sleep hungry because of a lack of food.
That is…
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
