Lake Chad Basin: Crisis Overview (as of 6 April 2017)

Background

Around 17 million people live in the affected areas across the four Lake Chad basin countries. The number of displaced people has tripled over the last two years. Most of the displaced families are sheltered by communities that count among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. Food insecurity and malnutrition have reached critical levels.

Recent developments

Food insecurity across the region is projected to worsen in the coming months as communities already struggling with severe food shortages and adversity traverse the lean season. The latest food security assessments show that more than 50,000 people risk famine in Nigeria’s north-eastern Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states between June and August. Some 5.2 million people are projected to suffer severe food scarcity, a third of them at “emergency” levels.

Across the Lake Chad Basin, almost seven million people are struggling with food insecurity. Timely funding will be required to provide agricultural inputs for communities during the upcoming lean season and ease the scale of food insecurity.

At the end of March, only 11.2 per cent of the US$1.5 billion required to cover the most urgent needs have been funded. In March, UNHCR reported that since January more than 2,600 Nigerian refugees were forcefully returned from Cameroon. Humanitarian partners have urged Nigeria’s neighbours to continue keeping their borders open to grant access and asylum to people fleeing the conflict. On 2 March, Cameroon and Nigeria together with UNHCR have signed a tripartite agreement on the voluntary repatriation of Nigerian refugees in Cameroon.