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View Full Version : Children dying before our eyes, says UNICEF official in Niger



Tayyib musawwir
08-13-2005, 02:54 AM
MARADI, Niger (AFP) - As the
United Nations sharply increased its estimate of the funds needed to deal with a disastrous famine in west Africa, a top UN children's fund official visited the worst-affected state of Niger and said she had seen infants dying.
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"When you see a child dying in front of your eyes, that means the food supply and malnutrition situation in the country is very serious," said
UNICEF Deputy Director General Rima Salah, who visited Niger along with Canadian International Cooperation Minister Aileen Carroll.

However "it is not too late to save many more children," she said, after visiting an emergency medical feeding centre in the southern town of Maradi.

Even as the two women visited the centre, run by the Doctors without Borders medical charity, a baby suffering from chronic malnutrition died.

The two officials, who arrived in the region on Friday, also visited a cereals bank run by local women, and which was to distribute a UNICEF gift of 10 tonnes of millet to pregnant women in need.

Meanwhile the United Nations said it had raised fivefold its estimate of the money needed to fight the famine in Niger.

It said that the worsening situation in the country and the increased scope of its activities meant that 80 million dollars were needed for emergency aid to feed more than 3.5 million people until the end of December, rather than the 16 million dollars originally envisaged.

So far "25 million have been mobilised or have been the subject of an announcement" while "55 million dollars remain to be mobilised," the UN said in a statement issued in Geneva.

At the same time the UN food aid agency urged donors not to forget other hard-hit countries in Africa's Sahel region, saying they faced similar hunger crises to the one in neighbouring Niger.

In Geneva the World Food Programme (WFP) said Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso were also at risk, following the same lethal combination of drought and crop-devouring locusts.

In Washington, meanwhile, the
World Bank extended more than 120 million dollars in emergency food aid for Niger.

"There are pockets now where people have no more food and they need to be helped until the next harvest, about mid-September," said the lender's country manager for the country, Vincent Turbat.

During her visit to the country, Carroll said that Canada would contribute a further 10 million Canadian dollars (8.2 million US dollars) to the relief effort.

And the
Democratic Republic of Congo, another African state with major problems of its own, said it was sending 120 tonnes of maize flour to Niger as a gift.
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