With international attention focused on the displacement crisis in the Lake Chad area of western Chad, where tens of thousands of people continue to seek refuge from Boko Haram violence, another chronic emergency also continues. Chad is in the grip of malnutrition crises – not just in the Lake region and not for the first time. There are estimates that some 3.4 million people lack reliable access to food, with 398,000 children across the country at risk of acute malnutrition.*

For the fourth time in five years, medical teams from Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) are responding to a nutrition crisis in Bokoro, in the Hadjer-Lamis region of central Chad. Since July, an MSF emergency team has treated more than 2,300 severely malnourished children in the area.

MSF launched its response in early June after discovering that alarming numbers of children in Bokoro were severely malnourished. An MSF team found that 5.5 percent of children under the age of five were suffering from severe acute malnutrition – more than twice the emergency threshold of 2 percent. This was at the very start of Chad’s annual ‘hunger gap’, a five-month period that usually lasts from June until end October.

“Providing feeding programmes and medical assistance to acutely malnourished children is essential, but it is simply not enough to stop hundreds of thousands of children across Chad repeatedly descending into emergency levels of malnutrition,” says Alberto Jodra, MSF head of mission in Chad. “Far more needs to be done to address malnutrition’s multiple structural causes and to ease the suffering of communities like Bokoro from plunging from one hunger crisis to the next.”

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