UN Suggests 7.7 million Nigerians Are In Need of Humanitarian Assistance

The UN has said 7.7 million people affected by the Boko Haram crisis in north-east are in need of humanitarian assistance.

UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria, Edward Kallon revealed this at a conference in New York tagged ‘Strengthening the Humanitarian and Development Partnership in the Lake Chad Region’.

He said, “In Nigeria, we are still facing a crisis of global magnitude. The figures are alarming — 10.2 million people — affected in three states in Northeast Nigeria, 7.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

“Our 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan was developed to provide assistance for 6.1 million people requiring slightly above a billion dollars in 2018.

“Before October 2016, the Nigerian Government and the international community were barely reaching 395,000 people of an estimated population of eight million people that were affected by the crisis.

“With your generous support and support of the Government of Nigeria, we were able to scale up assistance in 2017 and reached over 5.6 million people.

“It’s not only reaching these numbers that was important but that we were able to avert famine; we were able to contain serious cholera outbreak and we were able to address recurrent outflows and inflows of displaced people in the country.”

Kallon also called on donors’ support for returnees, saying, “we cannot address this crisis with humanitarian response alone. The root causes of this crisis are developmental in Northeast Nigeria.

“We are talking about serious concerns of poverty, poverty that is multi-dimension in nature as we speak these days.

“We’re talking about climate vulnerabilities that is compounding the impacts of the crisis. Hunger and conflict are feeding on each and all that in a vicious cycle in the Lake Chad Basin,” he said.