The crisis in Niger is far from over
Wednesday, 28 September 2005
The crisis in Niger is far from over
Niger isn’t headline news anymore but the crisis is far from over. Much has been done; food distributions will soon reach over one and half million people, emergency nutrition centers have been opened throughout the worst affected areas, and the rains have arrived so that the farmers who planted crops in time can hope for a good harvest. However for many others, the food crisis will not end with the October harvest and international assistance will be essential for at least another 12 - 15 months.
Unfortunately, not everyone had enough seeds to plant and their fields are empty. Others, that did plant, have already sold off or ‘mortgaged’ the expected harvest, in return for loans, that have already been spent on food. The situation varies from village to village, some are better off than others but the overall picture is one of continued fragility.
Concern’s emergency operation in Niger continues to scale up to meet the needs of the most affected people. In cooperation with the Ministry of Health, Concern has established 17 nutrition centers in Tahoua, a region that was badly affected by last years drought. It is a logistically challenging operation requiring trained professional mobile teams, backed with cars, supplies and communications equipment traveling for hours every day to villages scattered over vast distances and linked only by sandy dirt tracks. Concern’s nutrition program is already reaching 40,000 affected families and treating up to 6,000 malnourished children but more needs to be done to ensure that we are reaching all, especially the weakest.
To reach the centers, some mothers travel long distances with their sick child, walking for 8 to 12 hours. Sleeping under trees or along the roadside, so that they can be there in time, they line up in the morning to get the food and medical treatment that will be given every week until their child is healthy again. Then they walk home.
To reduce the distances for mothers and children, Concern is expanding the program into more remote villages. This week two new centers opened in the villages of Bagay and Wajee. Community mobilization teams have already spent time in the villages explaining how the program works and nutrition staff then screened children in the surrounding area, identifying those that are malnourished and need to be admitted to the program. Both centers registered over 250 children on the first day and large as these numbers are, they are still expected to go up as word spreads throughout the villages. This nutrition network is a critical life-line that reaches those most in need. It will stay for as long as the current crisis lasts.
Concern is looking beyond the current emergency and conducting assessments into longer term programming such as water, health to ensure that the root causes of this crisis are addressed. While drought and the plague of locusts contributed greatly to the food shortages in Niger, the key reason why this crisis has impacted so heavily is that it occurred in one of the poorest countries in the world. Already Niger is a country with one of the highest mortality rates in the world, where nearly one in three die before the age of 5 from a lack of clean water, food, medicines. It is only by addressing these issues that Niger will ever break out of the cycle of poverty and hunger.
By Dominic McSorley
