Ten million children in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, in the central region of the Sahel, urgently need humanitarian assistance, twice as many as in 2020, largely due to the escalation of conflicts, Unicef revealed this Friday.
In addition to these, almost four million children are at risk in neighboring countries, due to hostilities between armed groups and movements of military forces across borders, warned the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) in a report .
“The year 2022 was particularly violent for children in the central Sahel,” lamented Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF regional director for West and Central Africa, urging “all parties to the conflict to urgently cease attacks against children, against their schools and health centers. “.
In Burkina Faso, three times as many children were killed in the first nine months of 2022 than in the same period of 2021, according to data from the UN agency.
Children are increasingly “victims of intensified military clashes or targets of non-state armed groups,” Marie-Pierre Poirier said, with the report showing that most of those who died were victims of gunshot wounds during attacks on their villages. or exploding devices. or explosive remnants of war.
Children continue to be victims of armed groups that oppose state education, which “systematically burn and loot schools, threaten, kidnap or kill teachers,” Unicef said.
More than 8,300 schools were closed in the three countries because they were directly attacked, because teachers fled or because parents were displaced or feared sending their children to school, according to the report.
The crisis is worsening and “chronically and critically underfunded,” said UNICEF, which renewed the $473.8 million appeal for its humanitarian response in the central Sahel and neighboring coastal countries this year, after previously receiving only a third of his $391. million appeal.
Hostilities are spreading from the central Sahel to the northern border regions of Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo, “remote communities with scarce infrastructure and resources, where children have extremely limited access to essential services and protection”, warned. UN agency.
More than 20,000 people in the border area between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger will experience “catastrophic food insecurity” by June 2023, according to recent projections.
UNICEF said that in 2022, with the support of its partners in the central Sahel, 1.2 million children benefited from formal or non-formal education, 1.1 million were vaccinated against measles and almost 365,000 accessed health services. mental health and psychosocial support.
The intervention of the UN agency also allowed more than 446,000 children and women to access primary health care, that 674,000 children under 5 years of age with acute malnutrition were treated and almost 820,000 people benefited from access to drinking water.
In the five coastal countries bordering the central Sahel, 1.28 million people have received water, sanitation and hygiene, 7.1 million children have received educational materials and around 1.9 million children and women have access to primary health care services in units supported by UNICEF.
Source: TSF
