Victoria Mgbanwa
A non governmental organization Save the Children has called for global action on climate change, as flood in Borno State, Northeast Nigeria, displace over 400,000 people and has also left three million children without school, rising to Child Marriage, Malnutrition, and Disease Risks.
The organization has urged world leaders to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and make infrastructure like schools more resilient to extreme weather.
This was made known in a statement released by save the children on Thursday, describing the flood as the worst in 30 years, it stated that the flood have devastated communities already vulnerable due to years of armed conflict, kidnappings, and climate change. Farmland has been destroyed, compounding food insecurity.
The Country Director of Save the Children in Nigeria, Duncan Harvey, who visited Maiduguri in Borno state, stated that “This is a crisis upon a crisis – in an area where the creeping impacts of climate change were already putting food and clean water out of reach and malnutrition and disease was already rife among children.
“I have worked in the humanitarian sector for over 20 years and still, what I saw in Maiduguri shocked me to my core. Hundreds of thousands of children are crammed side by side in camps with no clean water, sanitation, food or healthcare. They are terrified and have lost everything – their homes, their belongings, sometimes their families.
“One of the most distressing things I saw was in one displacement camp where 22 children had been separated from their families. We are now making efforts with other agencies to reunify these children with family members, along with other strands of work to support affected children – but we need help from the Borno State Government and the federal government so that we can increase our support, and we need urgent funding from the international community.”
