WFP scales up to reach nearly a million people across the region
The floods tore through Halima Mustapha's home in northeastern Nigeria late at night, giving the 27-year-old mother and her family no warning. They fled minutes before the building collapsed, unable to take even the most basic necessities.
As the rains continue, the World Food Programme aims to reach nearly one million people across the region - including in other hard-hit countries like Mali, Chad and Niger - with cash, take-home food and hot meals, along with nutritional assistance for children and breastfeeding women. Already, WFP support has reached tens of thousands, and we are further assessing overall needs to better prepare our longer-term response.
On drier land, schools and other makeshift emergency shelters are packed. At the school Mustapha and her family found refuge, some squeeze into classrooms to sleep, but many others spread sleeping mats outside the building, where it's cooler and there's more space. For now, WFP aims to reach nearly 450,000 people in the hardest-hit parts of Borno State with food relief, including take-home rations of rice and pulses. We are dispatching WFP-managed UN Humanitarian Air Service helicopters to assess the damage, so the wider humanitarian community can better respond. At schools and other displacement shelters, WFP has also set up kitchens that serve up hot meals of rice and beans to roughly thousands of flood-affected families like Mustapha's.
The flooding is a further blow for Malians like Toure, who are struggling with myriad challenges, including frequent drought, conflict and high food prices. More than 1.3 million people in the country are acutely food-insecure. Even before the floods, the complex situation had already uprooted tens of thousands.
"I am in despair, because I no longer have a home," says 25-year-old Hadjara Karim, a mother of six, showing WFP the remnants of her collapsed mud-brick house, in Niger's southeastern Maradi region. The sun is shining, but her surroundings are a snapshot of desolation.
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