Severe funding constraints in West Africa, where hunger has reached a record high in a decade, have forced WFP to cut rations for refugees in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
UNICEF has already dispatched 400,000 water purification tablets that can support 80,000 households with clean water for a week. UNICEF is also procuring emergency medicine for health facilities.
An estimated 4.3 million people are impacted by flash floods in north-eastern districts. Experts considered the flood worse than the ones they had experienced in 1998 and 2004.
Three million children under five suffer from acute malnutrition, of whom 650,000 face severe acute malnutrition. Without any treatment, about half of those with severe acute malnutrition will die.
These figures do not include children displaced by climate and environmental shocks or disasters, as well as those newly displaced in 2022, including by the war in Ukraine.
Since 12 June, almost 16,000 Burkinabe, mostly women and children, have arrived in Dori, eastern Burkina Faso, after fleeing a brutal attack by armed men in Seytenga, 15km from the border with Niger.
IFRC is increasing its emergency appeal as 70 per cent of households are unable to meet basic needs and an estimated three million children are at risk of malnutrition amidst mounting poverty.
As many as 78.2 million children are out of school and just one in ten crisis-affected children attending primary or secondary education are achieving minimum proficiency standards.
Michelle Bachelet and Alice Nderitu expressed deep alarm about the impact of the recent increase in hostilities between the M23 armed group and the armed forces of the DRC on the local population.
"Outside the classroom, children are more vulnerable to early marriage, economic exploitation and recruitment by armed groups," said NRC's Natugasha. “We must keep the doors of the schools open."