Above: Zara (left) and Oumou (right) sit in their classroom at a school in Niger’s Tillabery region. The girls survive on one meal a day and find it difficult to concentrate because of low energy.
©UNICEF/Niger/2012/CTidey
Niamey, Niger -- It seems obvious that growing food insecurity in Niger would leave thousands of children across the country facing a nutrition crisis. If there is not enough quantity or quality food available, children, particularly those less than five years of age, are vulnerable to potentially life threatening malnutrition and associated health complications. What is less obvious perhaps, or at least given far less attention is the equally devastating impact food insecurity and malnutrition can have on a child’s education. When there is not enough to eat, school can quickly become an afterthought.
Zara, 14, and Oumou, 16, are cousins from the village of Bégorou Tondou in Niger’s Tillabery region – an area that has been especially hard hit this year by drought and poor harvest. Food has become scarce for the two girls and their family who are now surviving on just one meal a day. Meat and milk are long gone delicacies, their mutton and cattle having died months ago. The situation became so desperate that the girls’ fathers left to find work in Ghana late last year. Zara and Oumou have not heard from them since. They are, however, still attending school – at least for the time being.
Oumou summarizes their situation in this way, “We have never had so little food. Of course, I want to continue going to school, but sometimes I am so hungry and low on energy that I cannot even see the blackboard.” Zara agrees and suggests that if the situation does not improve, they may have no choice, but to stop coming altogether. Some of their classmates have done just that. Since October 2010, the number of students attending the girls’ school has dropped from 180 students to less than 100. Education authorities in the Téra district of Tillabery report that nearly 16,000 students have left school since the end of the harvest in late October.
While some friends of Oumou and Zara, have left school because they are too weak to attend class, others have left when their families moved away from their villages in search of food and work. According to HELP, an international NGO focusing on malnutrition prevention at the community level, entire villages in the Tillabery region have moved from their traditional land because all the food from October’s harvest, meant to last for six months or more, had already run out. Some displaced families move across the border into Burkina Faso, while others from rural areas migrate into urban centres like the capital Niamey. In both cases, access to education is extremely limited.
Twelve-year-old Semana and his family are now living as migrants on the outskirts of Niamey after they were forced to move from their village more than 60 kilometres away because of a lack of food. Semana has not been in school since the family moved several months ago and is unlikely to return to class any time soon. He is helping his father Oumarou earn money by transporting goods across town on their donkey cart. The work yields the equivalent of € 2 per day, but at least it provides them with enough to buy food. When asked about school, Semana says simply, “It (school) is not an option for me right now because I must work with my father to earn money for the food we eat.”
Growing food insecurity is also driving families apart. Many parents are leaving their children in villages where they are guaranteed at least one meal a day at the school, while they head to Niamey or Burkina Faso in search of work and food. Souleye is one such child, left by his parents to stay with his grandmother in the village of Bégorou Tondou so that he could have two meals a day attending the local school. Souleye’s parents left at the end of last year and will not return until the next harvest in October at the earliest. “Last year was okay, but not this year,” says Souleye. “I eat at school during the day, but it is not enough. Sometimes, I cannot sleep at night because of stomach cramps.”
The situation for Souleye and other students like him could become even more precarious. If the canteen stops many students will be forced to leave school, causing further interruption to their education. “We have enough food to last another week,” explains the school headmaster Ibrou Salifou in Bégorou Tondou. “If we have to stop the canteen, families with children will leave the village and we will be forced to close the school.”
Prolonged interruption of school attendance, like what we are seeing in Niger now because of the crisis, can seriously harm a child’s overall educational development and undermine the future employment opportunities that are necessary to break the cycle of poverty. In a country like Niger where nearly 60 per cent of the population live below the poverty line and educational indicators are among the lowest in the world, the importance of keeping children in school can hardly be overstated. Even before the onset of this year’s crisis, more than half of those Nigerien children who actually enrol in school drop out.
UNICEF is working with the Government of Niger and humanitarian partners including WFP to rapidly address the growing needs in the education sector including the provision of emergency school feeding, construction of temporary classrooms for displaced children and working with local authorities to expand the capacity of existing schools in host communities. But more help is needed. UNICEF requires US $ 25.7 million in funding to continue its response to meet the growing needs of children in Niger whose lives are under threat from the nutrition crisis. UNICEF and its partners call on the international community to intensify efforts and mobilize all means necessary to make sure that this threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of children is averted. It is not too late, but we must act now.
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