Nigeria is facing an alarming hunger crisis, with 31 million people – including 17 million children – suffering from malnutrition across the country’s northeastern states.
The worsening food insecurity is fueling recruitment by local jihadist groups and threatening to destabilize the region, according to aid agencies.
The crisis, described by humanitarians as “largely flying under the radar,” has reached record levels. UNICEF reports that 31 million Nigerians are now food insecure, a dramatic rise from 25 million just two years ago – the highest figure ever recorded.
Since January, more than 650 children have died from hunger in northern Nigeria, warns Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The organization says it has treated nearly 70,000 children in Katsina State alone in 2025, with severe malnutrition cases surging by 208% compared with last year. MSF has called the situation a catastrophe whose “real scale exceeds all predictions.”
“If we compare June 2025 to June 2024, we see a 60% increase in hospitalizations, knowing that 2024 was also a worse year than the previous ones,” said Emmanuel Berbain, MSF’s nutrition referent. “But beyond the increase in volumes and severity, what worries us enormously are the resilience mechanisms that we have observed and that are reported to us, namely the commodification of everything possible in the home to be able to buy something to eat at the end of the day.”
Chi Lael, spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Nigeria, shared a harrowing account: “Last week, I was at a nutrition clinic when a mother of five children arrived with her newborn. She told us that every night she boils a pot of water and stirs it constantly until her children fall asleep. Since she doesn’t have enough food to feed them more than once or twice a day, she pretends to cook to calm them down and help them sleep. It’s heartbreaking.”
Lael added: “We have never seen such an explosion of hunger with child malnutrition reaching such frightening levels: 17 million children are malnourished. And despite our efforts, the reality is brutal: 150 [WFP] nutrition clinics that help 300,000 children will close [in the northeast of the country by the end of the month]. Honestly, we don’t know how these children will survive.”
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