The nine-month-old twins were crying nonstop and tugging at their mother, begging not just for attention but for food. They had received very little in the previous 24 hours, and their oversized heads compared to their tiny bodies showed more serious signs of hunger.
“I don’t produce much milk,” says Dorcas Simon, a 38-year-old mother of three who struggled to breastfeed. She laughed to hide her pain. “What am I going to feed my kids if I can’t feed myself?”
Her twins were among 181 million children under the age of five — 27 percent of the world’s youngest children — who live in severe food poverty in northern Nigeria, where conflict and climate change have long contributed to the problem, according to a new report released Thursday by the United Nations Children’s Fund.
The report, which focused on about 100 low- and middle-income countries, defines severe food poverty as consuming nothing or at most two of the agency’s eight recognized food groups a day.
Africa’s population of over 1.3 billion people is one of the regions hardest hit by conflict, the climate crisis and rising food prices. The continent accounts for one third of the global burden and is home to 13 of the 20 most affected countries.
However, some progress has also been recorded, the report said.
The report said the proportion of children living in severe food poverty in West and Central Africa had fallen from 42 percent to 32 percent over the past decade, pointing to progress such as crop diversification and results-based incentives for health workers.
The agency, known as UNICEF, said children living on “very poor” diets are more likely to experience wasting, a life-threatening form of malnutrition, when essential nutrients are lacking.
“If you have severe wasting, you’re 12 times more likely to die,” Harriet Torres, one of the report’s authors, told The Associated Press.
In several communities across Nigeria, including Simon’s town of Kaltungo in the northeast, UNICEF is training thousands of women to boost their families’ nutrition by using cassava, sweet potato, maize and millet grown in their own gardens.
A dozen women gathered in the village of Pochereng in Kaltungo this week to learn dozens of recipes using food grown in sandbags that require little water when the rains fail.
Nigerian mothers are also facing one of the worst cost of living crises in the country, and growing food at home can help them save money.
Aisha Aliyu, 36, a mother of five, said her latest baby “used to be skinny but now he’s putting on weight because of the vegetables we grow at home.” Hauwa Bwami, 50, a mother of five, nearly lost her grandson to kwashiorkor, a disease involving severe protein malnutrition, before the UNICEF training began a year ago. She now grows enough food to sell to other women.
Kaltungo is in a semi-arid agricultural region where rainfall has decreased in recent years due to climate change, and women’s leader, Radi Abdullahi, said food shortages have led to children dying of acute malnutrition in the past.
The training “was like a prayer answered for me,” said Simon, who was new to the group.
But it can be a painful lesson: Another trainee, Florence Victor, 59, watched helplessly as her nine-month-old grandson died of malnutrition in 2022.
Over time, malnutrition can also weaken the immune system, making children more susceptible to deadly diseases.
In the Sahel, a semi-arid region south of the Sahara Desert that has become a hotspot for violent extremism, acute malnutrition – more severe than severe food poverty – is on the rise and reaching emergency levels, said Alfred Ejem, senior food security adviser at the African aid group Mercy Corps.
Displacement and climate change have forced families to turn to “bad coping mechanisms like eating leaves and locusts to survive,” Ecem said.
In conflict-hit Sudan, many children are dying from severe malnutrition.
At least 850 children in conflict-hit northwest Nigeria died within 24 to 48 hours of being admitted to health facilities last year, according to the French health organisation Doctors Without Borders.
“Our facilities are full so we have no choice but to treat patients on mattresses on the floor,” Simba Tirima, Nigerian representative for Doctors Without Borders, said on Tuesday.
Many malnourished children in the region cannot travel to hospital because they live in remote areas or their families cannot afford the costs of treatment.
A new report finds that inequality also contributes to acute food poverty among African children. In South Africa, the world’s most unequal country, roughly one in four children suffers from acute food poverty, despite being the continent’s most developed country.
Governments and partners must act urgently, said author Torres. “The work begins now.”
