UNICEF

Lagos (AFP) – UNICEF will continue to provide assistance to millions of conflict-affected children in northeast Nigeria, despite an attack on its convoy by Boko Haram Islamists, the UN children’s agency has said.

The jihadists ambushed a humanitarian convoy that included workers from UNICEF, UNFPA, and IOM while returning from Bama in northeast Borno state on Thursday, injuring several people, including two soldiers, and prompting UNICEF to temporarily suspend relief assistance to review the situation.

“We are working at full strength in the Borno state capital Maiduguri,” UNICEF Nigeria Representative Jean Gough said in a statement late Friday.

“We continue to call for increased efforts to reach people in desperate need across the state. We cannot let this heartless attack divert any of us from reaching the more than two million people who are in dire need of immediate humanitarian assistance.”

The agency urged donors and humanitarian organisations to scale-up the response to the emerging disaster in Borno state, the epicentre of Boko Haram’s seven-year insurgency.

“The violence has disrupted farming and markets, destroyed food stocks, and damaged or destroyed health and water facilities. We absolutely have to reach more of these communities,” he said.

UNICEF estimates that 244,000 children will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year in Borno state alone.

And if they are not reached with treatment, one in five of them will die.

The agency has provided two million people with health services and treated 56,000 children for malnutrition in the three conflict-affected states of northeast Nigeria.

Thursday’s attack was the first such attack on aid workers in the volatile region.

Nigerian military said the attack left two soldiers and three civilians injured, including UN aid workers.

Some cities in the northeast, including Bama, had gone for up to 18 months without any humanitarian deliveries before aid agencies and the UN arrived in June.

Many areas can only be accessed under escort from the Nigerian army.

In May, the UN said 9.2 million people living around Lake Chad, which forms the border of Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger, were in desperate need of food. Seven million of them are in Nigeria.

Boko Haram, which seeks to impose strict Islamic law in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for some 20,000 deaths and displacing more than 2.6 million people since 2009.

The world must focus more on helping the poorest children to build on progress achieved in health and education over the past 25 years, UNICEF said Tuesday.

In its annual “State of the World’s Children” report, the UN children’s agency took stock of important gains such as a 53 percent drop in infant mortality since 1990 and a dramatic reduction in extreme poverty.

But without a sharper focus on the most vulnerable, it warned, 69 million children under five will die from preventable causes and 167 million will suffer poverty over the next 15 years.

Without a shift, some 750 million women and girls will have been married as children by 2030, the deadline set by the United Nations to achieve its new global goals for sustainable development.

Progress so far “has mainly been made by focusing a lot on children that are more easy to reach, or on interventions on health and nutrition with a high impact,” said Justin Forsyth, UNICEF’s deputy executive director.

“What we are finding now is that if we do not focus on the most disadvantaged we won’t accelerate this progress,” he added. “We have made tremendous progress,” said Ted Chaiban, director of programs at UNICEF. “But that progress has not been fair.”

The world’s poorest children are twice as likely to die before they turn five and to be chronically malnourished than the richest, according to UNICEF.

Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost three times more likely to die before they are 5 than those born to mothers with a secondary education.

Girls from the poorest households are twice as likely to marry as children than those from the wealthiest households.

The number of children out of school, on the rise since 2011, presents another worrying trend. With around 124 million children today who do not attend primary or middle school, education is key to reaching the most vulnerable, Chaiban argued.

“Where there has been a strong investment in basic education around the world, there has been a tremendous return on investment,” he said. Each year of education completed increases adult earnings by 10 percent. With no action to address inequality, societies worldwide will feel “a dramatic impact and it will fuel instability,” Forsyth said.

UNICEF resumes aid to NE Nigeria after convoy attack

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