The number of malnutrition cases in Kawar Maila internally displaced persons’ camp in Maiduguri has surged and there is nothing mothers can do because they cannot afford nutritious food and they have not had food assistance for a year.
Yakura Alhaji Ali, who lives in the camp, told RNI reporter Aisha Jama that she could not eat healthy and nutritious food because she could not afford it.
“It has been a year now since we had food assistance. I have two children and it is very difficult to for me to feed them. I go outside the camp in search of something to eat. When we get maize, we cook it with a local soup. We cannot even buy beans so we just manage with what we get to avoid hunger.
“I know it is important for me to eat nutritious food because I have to feed my baby of three months. But I can’t afford the food I should be eating.”
Falmata Ali Usman, who has seven children, said: “We do not get enough help with food and sometimes, if we do, it just takes so long to reach us.
“Sometimes we sleep without eating. If we get food we eat together. But sometimes there is so little that we give it to the children only because when they are hungry they cry all night.”
Usman said many children in the camp suffered from malnutrition. “Even this one, my little child, is 10 months old but, as you see, he still looks like a tiny baby because I did not eat well and what he got from me was not enough to make him healthy. We are living a hard life and we all need from authorities is assistance.”
Muhammad Bulama, a healthcare worker in Kawar Maila, said: “We used to get five to six malnutrition cases a day, but now we get more than 30 to 50 – and sometimes even more come for help. At times there are 100 mothers who need help so that they can feed their infants properly.”
He said in most cases feeding mothers did not get healthy food to eat so the babies were not getting enough nutrition from their breast milk.
“When mothers do not get healthy food, their breast milk is not sufficient for the babies, especially when they are about six months old. But most mothers simply do not have the means to buy nutritious food and that can affect the baby’s health system for life.”
Bulama said most of the fathers were farmers but there was no land for them to farm living in the camp so they had “no money, no food and no jobs, all of which contributes to their children suffering from malnutrition”.
“Some clinics in Maiduguri, such as the Abba Ganaram Primary Health Care Clinic and Save the Children, a non-profit organisation, help us. Some of the babies from this camp are admitted to clinics, but the rest are left here for us to try to care for them. But we do not have enough to give to the mothers for their malnourished children.
“We are begging the authorities to help feeding mothers to get a healthy diet so that their babies will thrive.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said malnutrition was a direct or underlying cause of 45% of all deaths of under-five children.
Nigeria had the second-highest burden of stunted children in the world, with a national prevalence rate of 32% of children under five. An estimated two million children in Nigeria suffered from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), but only two out of every 10 children affected were getting treatment, it said. About 7% of women of childbearing age also suffered from acute malnutrition.
The agency said the states in northern Nigeria were the most affected by the two forms of malnutrition – stunting and wasting. High rates of malnutrition posed significant public health and development challenges for the country. Stunting, in addition to an increased risk of death, was also linked to poor cognitive development, a lowered performance in education and low productivity in adulthood – all contributing to economic losses estimated to account for as much as 11% of Gross Domestic Product.
AISHA SD JAMAL
