One out of every eight children under the age of 5 in Niger, Africa, is expected to die in the next 30 days from severe malnutrition. Declaring a state of emergency and desperately pleading for help from others, the government of Niger reports that more than 7 million children, women, and men - in other words, nearly half of the country’s entire population - are literally starving.
Some of you have recently read the reports in the news and watched the videos of the starving, emaciated children struggling to breathe, struggling to suckle, struggling to stay alive.
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Entire villages have been abandoned as the residents have begun the long, desperate trek in search of food. Mothers are walking for days to reach emergency feeding centers as they pray that they can reach them in time to save their children’s lives. Farmers are calling the long, three-year drought, failed crops, and current lack of food the worst crisis Niger has faced in 30 years.
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, and Mali are similarly affected. Herders in Chad are also calling this the worst situation they have lived through in 30 years. In rural Chad - where ADRA is already working with refugees from Sudan - cattle are the people’s bank account, the money that they turn to in times of family sickness or the backup plan for feeding their family when crops fail. So the loss of an estimated one-third of the country's livestock to drought is a disaster. A government survey finds that the 2009 drought destroyed pasture, dried up water sources, and killed 780,000 cattle worth US$460 million. It also cut the cereal harvest by 34 percent compared to 2008, throwing 2 million people who would normally be living off the land into the "at-risk" category.
Please pray for these children and their families who are struggling for their very survival. And pray for those who tirelessly work with stubborn hope in a broken world.
