Window of Opportunity For Sahel Rapidly Closing

Jennifer Leong

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 2010 (IPS) – Over the past six months, the levels of food insecurity and malnutrition in the Sahel belt of West Africa have increased at alarming rates, putting over 10 million people at risk across the region particularly in Niger and Chad.
The coming weeks are a critical period for humanitarian assistance efforts, Nicholas Alipui, UNICEF Director of Programmes, told the IPS, explaining that a large number of young children are currently on the borderline of suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM).

The next 6 to 8 weeks is the harvest season but food and water are both in short supply, Alipui said, If we do not ramp up our support, excess mortality would result. The coming weeks is our window of opportunity .

In a special briefing on the crisis held Tuesday, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes, joined representatives from UNICEF and OXFAM, in stressing the urgent need for humanitarian support in the Sahel to be stepped up.

The message to member states is, to give whatever support they can more attention and more resources, Holmes said.

Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), who is currently in Niger, called in to the U.N. Headquarters to make a further appeal. Donor support is crucial at this stage, she stressed.
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Niger is at the centre of the crisis. The latest figures released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) indicates that over 7 million people 47.7 percent of the population of Niger are in a situation of moderate to severe food insecurity.

A June UNICEF survey reveals that a nutritional crisis among children accompanies the food crisis 16.7 percent of children aged 6 to 59 months in Niger are affected, exceeding the 15 percent emergency threshold.

The prevalence of SAM has also risen from 2.1 percent in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2010. More than 120,000 children have already been treated between Jan. and Jun. 2010, hospital admissions having sharply increased since mid-May.

Aid organisations in Niger have launched a revised Emergency Humanitarian Action Plan (EHAP) requesting over 371 million dollars to respond to the crisis almost doubling the earlier call of 190 million dollars.

At present only 142 million dollars have been received or committed.

Eveline Rooijmans, Humanitarian Policy Advisor for OXFAM, told the IPS that it is vital that funds are allocated and used in a flexible manner , food provision being only one aspect of the assistance efforts. Rooijmans believes that long-term planning is as important as short-term relief.

Mid-term recovery should include re-investment in livestock and seed varieties. Long-term policy reform, Rooijmans said, adding that, improvement in infrastructure like irrigation systems is also crucial.

The pastoral situation is precarious for many livestock herders. Chad is affected by the region s vulnerability to drought and failed crops and animal mortality is increasing due to a second consecutive year of fodder and water deficits.

Chad s drop in harvest and livestock production is affecting at least 1.6 million people. Child mortality has increased from 2 deaths per 10,000 per day to 2.3 per 10,000 per day in just one year.

In Niger, assistance efforts operated jointly by the government, U.N. agencies and various NGOs include: the joint WFP-UNICEF blanket supplementary feeding operation to prevent acute malnutrition among 644,000 children aged between 6 to 23 months; the joint government-WFP operation of free targeted food distributions; cash transfers; as well as the medical treatment of SAM among children and pregnant women.

In Chad, from January to May this year alone, a total of 6,508 children were admitted to the UNICEF-supported therapeutic feeding programmes in the Kanem and Barh-El-Ghazal regions.

The panel noted that significant progress has been made during the past 6 months to minimise the devastating effects of the food and malnutrition crisis hitting the Sahel region, however they stressed that gains could be reversed if the international donor community does not ramp up its support in a timely manner.