Inside the Sahel drought emergency

 

MOUSSORO, CHAD, April 13, 2012 -  I have finally arrived in Moussoro, Bahr el Gazal, after a five-hour drive from Chad’s capital city N’djamena.  The IRC started providing emergency health care here in 2010, in response to the last severe drought to hit this arid region. 

 

Traveling with me through Bahr el Gazal is Felix Leger, the IRC’s country director in Chad.  As we drove across the desert in temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), Felix explained why this year’s drought has hit people in Chad especially hard. In 2010, he said, five regions were affected by drought. This year it is eight.  Making matters worse, violent conflicts in neighboring countries have cut off sources of food and income that people from these already impoverished areas relied on. 

 

After civil war broke out in Libya last year, for example, more than 80,000 migrant workers who used to send their earnings home returned to Chad without jobs. Another conflict, in northern Nigeria, has shut down trade in food and grain across the Chad-Nigeria border. Irregular rains in the south of Chad  (traditionally the bread basket of the country), along with an insect infestation that has destroyed crops, have also left Chadians scrambling to find alternative sources of food.

 

In response to the food crisis, the IRC is scaling up nutrition programs and medical assistance in all 26 of our health centers in Bahr el Gazal. We’re also dispatching a mobile clinic to reach nomadic communities.

 

Dr. Martin Bubu, the IRC field coordinator for the region, tells me that it’s children who have been hit hardest by this crisis. Typically about 750 children are treated for severe acute malnutrition in IRC clinics here during the month of March. That figure more than doubled in March 2012.  “The situation is worsening,” Dr. Bubu said. “This is an emergency.”

 

Dr Bubu is also concerned that the incidence of measles, which exposes children to an increased risk of malnutrition, has worsened in the last six months.  Nearly 9 out of ten children between the ages of six months and 12 years have not had the measles shots they need.  “We plan to redress this next month by organizing a massive measles vaccination campaign,” Dr. Bubu said.

 

Health care in Chad is not free, so the medical assistance the IRC provides is vital for many families here.  We are focusing our emergency response on some of the most vulnerable Chadians: children under the age of five, pregnant women and new mothers. 

 

Tomorrow, I leave first thing in the morning to meet IRC medical staff in communities around Bahr el Gazal and talk with women about how the drought is affecting their lives.