As we reflect on the staggering statistics surrounding childhood malnutrition, it is impossible not to feel a deep sense of urgency and empathy.
Emergency contexts exacerbate the interlocking factors causing malnutrition. Seventy per cent of people who are unable to meet their daily nutritional needs live in conflict-affected areas. As a Kenyan medic working with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) over the past 20 years, I have witnessed how healthcare responses have been particularly challenging in such contexts as Somalia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen.
Despite the use of a variety of models of care adapted to the difficulties of responding in conflict settings, we as humanitarian workers still face major obstacles in ensuring the provision of medical care to prevent and treat malnutrition and its complications. As a result, we continue to lose lives, often amongst those whose lives represent our very hopes for the future.
MSF has implemented decentralised nutrition activities as an effective strategy to help improve access to care in highly insecure contexts. In 2023, through the implementation of community models, our medical teams working in five north-western states of Nigeria admitted over 200,000 malnourished children with severe acute malnutrition in our outpatient and inpatient facilities. Again in 2023, in Somalia, we treated more than 28,000 patients in the outpatient facilities for acute malnutrition in Baidoa city and the surrounding Bay Region.