MSF Nigeria: 'Malnutrition is not just a short-term emergency - it’s a lifelong struggle for many children'

17 July 2025 - Survivors of childhood malnutrition often experience physical and cognitive delays that can lead to irreversible and lasting damage long into adulthood. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is warning of the devastating long-term consequences of malnutrition as the international medical humanitarian organisation records a surge in cases in northern Nigeria.

At an MSF-supported inpatient therapeutic feeding centre in Maiyama General Hospital in Kebbi State, two-year-old Ummul Khairun Mohammed is receiving treatment for severe acute malnutrition. Due to developmental delays caused by the condition, she is still unable to walk.

The little girl is one of thousands of under five-year-old children currently receiving care from MSF teams across northern Nigeria during the annual peak malnutrition season.

For several days – sometimes up to several weeks – these children receive treatment aimed at stabilising them, addressing medical complications, and promoting rapid weight gain.

While most children recover, many will suffer long-term consequences.

“Malnutrition is not just a short-term emergency — it is a lifelong struggle for many children,” says Dr Jamila Shuaibu Bello, an MSF doctor in the northern state of Kano. “It affects brain development. Malnutrition weakens the immune system, making children more susceptible to communicable diseases. It is also linked to chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension.”

Even a few weeks of experiencing severe malnourishment can severely disrupt a child’s motor development. Affected children may miss key milestones such as crawling by 8–10 months or walking by 18 months. Chronic malnutrition often results in stunting — a condition that impairs mental development, school performance, and cognitive abilities. In girls, stunting can also lead to obstetric complications later in life due to smaller pelvis size.

If these issues are not addressed early, the damage can be irreversible. To respond to long-term effects of malnutrition, MSF is pioneering two new approaches.

With the support of the MSF Foundation, which creates new medical tools for the most neglected patients where MSF operates, our teams recently launched paediatric physiotherapy programmes in the northwestern states of Kano and Katsina. These sessions include guided exercises, play-based therapy, and training for caregivers to continue therapy at home. Each intervention is tailored to the child’s developmental stage and condition, helping rebuild strength, coordination, and confidence.

While still in their pilot stage, the two projects are already showing promising results in helping children regain motor functions and achieve developmental milestones.

Thirteen-month-old Usman Aliyu was treated for malnutrition at Unguwa Uku hospital in Kano before participating in physiotherapy sessions. “Before Usman fell ill, he could crawl and stand. But he lost those abilities due to the sickness,” says Usman’s mother Aisha Aliyu. “In the physiotherapy sessions, he was taught to stand again and is now taking steps towards walking.”

An MSF physiotherapist in Kano, Fatima Abdulmajid says, “When I first arrived, I was shocked by the severity of motor delays, but seeing the children’s progress week after week through motor stimulation makes me proud of the work we are doing.”

Malnutrition also affects mental health. Children are more likely to develop anxiety and depression, while caregivers often feel helpless and overwhelmed as they watch their child grow weak and unresponsive.

To address this, MSF provides psychosocial support as part of its malnutrition projects in several states — including Zamfara, Bauchi, Sokoto, Borno, Kebbi, Kano, and Katsina. Services include play therapy, counselling, and caregiver education to help families manage emotional and behavioural challenges.

“It's one thing to treat the child medically, and it's another to assess which areas of development have been emotionally affected,” explains Kauna Hope Bako, MSF’s mental health supervisor in Bauchi. “Mental health support helps manage the child's overall well-being. We stimulate the child emotionally and engage all these areas that have been compromised due to malnutrition.”

The integration of physiotherapy and mental health support into malnutrition treatment marks a critical step toward holistic care that goes beyond just survival to support a child’s quality of life.

Malnutrition is a public health emergency in Nigeria. According to UNICEF, an estimated three million children are currently suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in the country, up from 2.6 million in 2024. Of these, 1.65 million are in six conflict-affected northern states – areas that MSF operates in.

MSF has been raising the alarm about the worsening malnutrition situation in northern Nigeria since 2022. In 2024 alone, more than 250,000 children with severe acute malnutrition were admitted to MSF-supported outpatient facilities and 76,000 acutely malnourished children with medical complications to inpatient facilities, representing an increase of 38 percent and 53 percent respectively compared to 2023.

This year, anticipating an even earlier start of the peak season that typically runs from June through September, MSF increased in-patient bed capacity, scaled up out-patient therapeutic feeding centres and hired more staff. The organisation also boosted health promotion activities in several communities that include education on how to prevent, detect and treat malnutrition, and the need to take children for medical treatment early.

From January to May 2025, MSF admitted 24,784 severely malnourished children in inpatient therapeutic feeding centres, and 107,461 children in outpatient therapeutic feeding centres in northern Nigeria, an increase of 13 percent compared to the same period in 2024.

The persistent malnutrition crisis in northern Nigeria stems from a variety of factors such as inflation, food insecurity, insufficient healthcare infrastructure, ongoing security issues, and disease outbreaks worsened by low vaccine coverage. The situation is further exacerbated by funding shortages for the already inadequate nutrition response.

To address such a complex issue, a holistic approach is needed from all local and international actors involved — not only to treat malnourished children in the short term, but also to tackle the long-term consequences of malnutrition.

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Note for editors: MSF manages 11 inpatient therapeutic feeding centres (ITFCs) and more than 30 outpatient therapeutic feeding centres (ATFCs) in seven states in northeast and northwest Nigeria: Borno, Bauchi, Kano, Kebbi, Zamfara, Sokoto and Katsina.