The North is currently facing an alarming malnutrition crisis, Doctors Without Borders says.
In Katsina State for example, the Médecins Sans Frontières said its teams were seeing an “ever-increasing number of malnourished children in its therapeutic feeding centres”, with “increasingly severe conditions and higher mortality rates”, according to a statement by MSF on Friday.
In collaboration with the local authorities, the MSF disclosed that emergency prevention distribution of nutritional supplements had started for 66,000 children in the local government area of Mashi.
“In the context of drastic cuts in international funding, the need for prevention and treatment of malnutrition is enormous in northern Nigeria, and urgent mobilisation is required,” said the humanitarian agency.
By the end of June 2025, nearly 70,000 malnourished children had already received medical care from our teams in Katsina, including nearly 10,000 who were hospitalised in serious condition, the statement added. It noted that without taking into account the new healthcare facilities opened by MSF during the year in Katsina, this represents an increase of approximately one-third compared to last year.
In addition, between January and June 2025, the number of malnourished children with nutritional oedema, the most severe and deadly form of malnutrition, rose by 208 percent compared with the same period in 2024, according to the MSF.
“Unfortunately, 652 children have already died in our facilities since the beginning of 2025 due to a lack of timely access to care. A worrying sign of the growing severity of this major public health emergency, is that adults—particularly women, including pregnant and breastfeeding women—are also affected.
“A screening carried out in July in all five MSF malnutrition centers in Katsina State on 750 mothers of patients revealed that more than half of adult caregivers were acutely malnourished, including 13 percent with severe acute malnutrition,” the statement said.
To cope with the massive influx of children expected by the end of the lean season in October, MSF stated that it had increased its support to local authorities in several states in the North where “we provide care to the population. In Katsina state for instance, we opened a new ambulatory therapeutic feeding center (AFTC) in Mashi and an additional inpatient therapeutic feeding center (ITFC) in Turai, to provide a total of 900 beds in two MSF-supported hospitals”.
“The year 2024 marked a turning point in northern Nigeria’s nutritional crisis, with an increase of 25 percent from the previous year,” stated Ahmed Aldikhari, country representative of MSF in Nigeria. “But the true scale of the crisis exceeds all predictions. We are currently witnessing massive budget cuts, particularly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, which are having a real impact on the treatment of malnourished children.”
Earlier this week, the World Food Programme announced it will be forced to suspend all emergency food and nutrition aid for 1.3 million people in Northeast Nigeria by the end of July due to ‘critical funding shortfalls’.
