The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) has said that insecurity deprived 3.7 million people of food and protection in the Northeast.
The UN raised the alarm Wednesday in its 2021 first quarter Dashboard released in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital.
“Northeast, Nigeria has reached an alarming level of food insecurity and hunger,” the Dashboard declared; stating that 5.1 million people are projected to be critically food insecure during the lean season of June-August, 2021.
The over a decade long insurgency has killed 36,000 with property worth $9.1 billion (N3.42 trillion) in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
It said that out of the 4.3 million targeted people, only 1.4 million were reached with food and non-food items.
On people’s inaccessibility to food, it said: “Only 689,000 displaced persons in camps were reached, while 86,000 IDP returnees and 661,000 people in host communities had access to the distributed food items.
It noted that 62% of reached people with food are children, while the response trend of funding ($354 million) also fell from 9% in January to 6% in March this year.