Ten million children in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are in dire need of humanitarian assistance amid deepening conflicts, double the number in 2020, Unicef said on Friday.
Burkina Faso, the scene of two military coups in 2022, has been caught in a spiral of jihadist violence since 2015 that emerged a few years earlier in Mali and Niger and is spreading across their borders.
Almost four million children are at risk in neighboring Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, UNICEF estimates in a report.
“Armed conflicts are affecting more and more children, who are becoming victims of intensifying military conflicts or are being targeted by non-state armed groups,” UNICEF Regional Director for East, West and Central Africa Marie-Pierre Poirier said in a press release.
“The year 2022 was particularly violent for children in the central Sahel. All parties to the conflict must urgently stop the attacks against them, but also against their schools, health centers and homes,” she continues.
According to the UN agency, armed groups opposed to the state education system burn and loot schools, but also threaten, kidnap or execute teachers.
More than 8,300 schools have been closed in the three countries (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger), either because they were targeted or because parents were displaced or afraid to send their children there.
“Catastrophic” food insecurity
In Burkina Faso, data collected by the United Nations showed that the number of children killed had tripled in the first nine months of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.
Most of these children died from gunshot wounds in attacks on their village or from improvised explosive devices or ammunition.
This crisis is taking place in one of the most climate-change affected regions of the planet, with rising temperatures and more erratic rainfall causing flooding.
At the same time, some armed groups resort to blockading towns and villages and sabotaging water supply networks as tactics.
All of this fuels food insecurity. More than 20,000 people living in the border region between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger will reach what it calls “catastrophic” food insecurity by June, according to Unicef.
Hostilities extend beyond the central Sahel into the border regions of northern Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo, where isolated communities lack infrastructure and resources and where children’s access to basic services and protection is very limited .
But humanitarian interventions are underfunded. In 2022, Unicef received only a third of the $391 million requested to fund its operations in the region. For 2023, 473.8 million US dollars are required.