Having led our response to the food crisis in 2010, the memories are still fresh in my mind. I know the earlier we respond, the more lives we can save.

I’ve worked on emergency responses for over a decade — from the earthquake in Haiti, to civil war in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After years living and working in conflict zones, I’m currently based in our head office in London and advise our teams in West Africa. In times of emergency, I fly out to lead the response — as I’m doing now in Niger.

Never a quiet moment

As Team Leader my days are always busy — often ten hours a day, seven days a week — it’s a demanding role.

The first step is for teams on the ground to meet with communities and assess the situation, asking questions such as ‘How many meals are you eating?’, ‘Are you having to work longer hours to meet your survival needs?’.

Once we have that information, I set about planning our response and securing funding.

I have regular meetings with high-level donors where I explain our plans and ability to respond to the crisis. I assess how many staff we’ll need and when, make sure we have a good supply of vital medicines and food, and ensure our staff are always safe. There are a lot of moving parts to get right!

This year our advocacy department published a new report – A Dangerous Delay – calling for early funding to stave off food crises before they peak. This has already been mentioned by some key donors and is helping us to raise the money desperately needed to help save lives.

Help us reach vulnerable children — please donate now

Already a crisis

Over the years I have seen first-hand how vulnerable communities are in Niger. Families often depend on their crops for survival and their limited diet means many children grow up malnourished — stunting their development and making them vulnerable to disease.

Now that the rains have failed, insects have destroyed some of the crops and prices are rising — over five million people are facing hunger.

Parents are being forced to migrate in search of food and work, leaving children alone and vulnerable.

There are reports of children withdrawing from school to help their parents earn money or farm the land and our health workers are expecting to see an increase in children suffering from severe malnutrition.

I hope that now we have raised the alarm, the international community will respond with early action to stave off this crisis before it’s too late.

Please donate to our Niger appeal

This blog was written by Michelle Brown, Team Leader, Niger Emergency Response.

Rainfall has been limited and crops are failing. Families are struggling to feed themselves and the early warning signs are signalling a looming food crisis.

Children are always the most vulnerable – with children under five suffering the most from a lack of nutritious food.

One child among thousands

Thousands of children already pass through our health centres in Niger every year. Some  need immediate life-saving help and our staff expect to see an increase in these cases if immediate action is not taken.

Two-year-old Aouta was one of these children. Weighing a third of the what he should, and showing signs of a life-threatening infection, he was immediately rushed to hospital by Save the Children.

Find out more about our emergency work in Niger

Aouta’s father is a farmer and his family were already living on the edge of survival.

When Aouta suffered from acute diarrhoea and vomiting, his family were unable to access medical care. Instead, his mother took him to a local healer who used counterfeit medicine, a common problem here.

Unsurprisingly, Aouta did not get better but deteriorated rapidly. For two months he fought sickness and lost weight. By the time one of our health workers found Aouta, his mother thought he would die.

Life-saving health workers

Trained by Save the Children, our community health worker instantly diagnosed Aouta as severely malnourished.

He was taken to hospital, where our team of doctors and nurses quickly stabilized him. He has now recovered and is back at home.

Aouta was found just in time. Without our network of community health workers, his story may have had a different ending.

We are rapidly scaling up our health programmes to cope with the rise in malnutrition amongst the children of Niger. But we can’t do this alone.

Unless the international community acts now on the looming crisis, our team will see more cases like Aouta.

Please donate to our Niger appeal

As a result of Save the Children’s partnership with Glaxo Smith Kline, we have a network of health workers who work within a community and deliver basic health care, referring serious cases to clinics. These workers have become a critical bridge between the community and health facilities. With the support of Glaxo Smith Kline, we have expanded the reach of these workers to two further districts.

Within moments of arriving at the clinic Dr Morou had located the relevant register, flipped to the right page and found Saminou’s details. Saminou Laoualy, admitted on September 9 2010, then aged 23 months, suffering severe acute malnutrition and diarrhoea, stabilised and discharged two weeks later, home to his village of Kalgo. He’d been saved.

Saminou at the medical clinic

When I last wrote, I said that Niger felt, at times, like being in the apocalypse. It felt impossible; the challenges were too great, the resources too few. Once more Dr Morou had worked his magic and guided a desperately sick child away from death back to his family.

We jumped back into the car, spirits high, and continued the search for Saminou.  Several hours later, up dirt tracks, down sandy roads, through mud villages and following numerous directions, we arrived in Saminou’s village. Armed only with some poor quality prints, screen grabs from the Sky website, we asked the crowd that gathered around us; did they know this boy? Yes they nodded, eager to please. Could they take us to his mother? Yes, they could, they said. One thing though, they added. That boy is dead.

Saminou died. He left the clinic well, and he died one week later. He died from disease, not from a lack of food. They don’t know what disease.

We went to the family home. Saminou was taken to the clinic by his grandmother as his mother, Rashida, was pregnant at the time. “How was she?” we asked her husband. Hiding, he almost smiled, she’s scared of the white people. And the new baby?

Buried. Just weeks after Saminou died, his mother gave birth again. But the baby was born dead. In the two months we’d been away the tiny, terrified, 18-year-old girl who was finally coaxed from hiding by her 23-year-old husband, lost both of her children.

Looking at his mother’s young, beautiful and broken-hearted face, there was nothing I could say. I don’t know what to say now either. Logically, I already knew that this is what we might learn. The statistics are there. In Niger one in six children die before they are five years old. I had already found two other children, Rahina and Tsiharou, who had also been treated at the clinic, had also been close to death, and found them both alive and well. If I looked for four more, I would probably learn that one child hadn’t made it. That one turned out to be Saminou.

And the baby that never lived? The statistics were there as well. In 1998, the World Health Organisation found that 2.3% of children in Niger were born with a low birth weight. In 2005, Niger suffered a food crisis. In 2006, the number of children born underweight rose to 20.3% — it increased nine times. The food crisis in 2010 affected twice as many people as in 2005 and Saminou had lived in one of the hardest-hit areas.

We gave Rashida the pictures we had of Saminou, wishing desperately that they were better, that they’d been taken when he was well so she could remember her son healthy, that there was some reassurance we could give that things would change. But we couldn’t.

Niger has had help in 2010. There has been an emergency and an emergency response to match. Saminou suffered in the food crisis, but the emergency treatment was there and it was not the food crisis that killed him. With no clean water, no latrine, and a mud hut as a home, a life lost to disease is one lost to poverty.

Niger is the least developed country in the world but it receives about half of the amount of overseas development aid received by Zimbabwe, a quarter that’s given to Mozambique and a sixth of the amount allocated to Ethiopia. It needs investment to bring everyone here to a place where they can work, stay healthy, feed themselves, and where 18-year-old mums like Rashida don’t lose two children in two months.

Sky News are telling Saminou’s story over Christmas. You know the ending already, but please watch it anyway.

Please support our Niger Appeal

The average woman in Niger will have 7 children in her lifetime. Many women are also part of polygamous families, sharing their husband with other wives. Mothers traditionally have fewer rights over their children than fathers do irrespective of the laws in place to protect women’s rights. Convention can and does defer to a father’s family over a mother. Overall in the country, only about 20% of the population can read. Broken down by gender, 42% of men can read, while only 15% of women can.

Early marriage, even as young as age 14, is not unheard of. Families play a strong role in ensuring that their children are married at culturally acceptable times to good families. Economic constraints and hard times can lead to a sped-up marriage process, at times forcing girls into marriages they’re not ready for. The cultural standard of a Nigerien bride is a young woman sitting on her parents’ bed, wrapped from head to toe, weeping. Once a female is married, she is no longer considered a child, no matter what age she is.

Not many women give birth in health clinics or hospitals, but if you’ve ever seen these clinics here you would understand why. Even coming from a culture that inundates you with the universal truth that “you should go to the doctor, just to be safe” for anything under the sun, it’s easy to see why women would prefer to suffer in the comfort of their own homes.

In rural Niger the closest clinics, which can still be a day or two’s walk away, may only have one staff member skilled in attending a birth. Maternity “wards”—if we can even call a single room off to the side a “ward”— might only contain a single bed that has seen better days. Culture dictates that you cannot scream or show your pain; the idea of pain medication is a luxurious, laughable dream. Let’s not even talk about such crazy ideas as “bedside manner” or “customer service.” Just consider it non-existent.

This year, the stories we collected about families suffering from the food crisis only made these problems more apparent. I’ve read countless case studies of mothers who have brought their children to the intensive nutritional stabilization unit. The stories they tell are never only about the one child admitted – they are about their other children who have died, their struggles to manage seemingly mysterious health problems, the pressures they face within their communities to treat their children’s illnesses through sometimes dangerous and often ineffective traditional practices.

We need to do more for mums

They are about women who are grateful to have a clear answer for why their baby won’t eat anymore, who are excited to see them smile again. Having this knowledge makes me more respectful of the silent calm on women’s faces, but increasingly angry as the only word I can find that fits is “appalling.” My half-hearted attempts to broach the subject with people who tell me these tales are usually met with a shrug and a “c’est comme ca” [it's like that].

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Improving the lives of mothers is a key gateway to improving the lives of children. When moms eat well, babies are healthier. Safe birthing conditions improve a baby’s chances of survival during those first vulnerable days of life. Family planning and proper birth spacing improves the health of all of her children. Educated mums are better able to identify their children’s health problems and know more about what services are available to treat them.

We need to do more for mums, so that every child, present and future, has a chance.

Find out more about Niger’s food crisis

Before the rain makes the situation better, it makes it worse. Between the week I arrived and last week, the number of children being brought to Save the Children when they were sick rose from 2,000 children per week to over 15,000.

Malaria has erupted, with 1.5 million cases recorded this year in Niger compared to 1 million by this time last year. The worst floods in 80 years have hit the capital, Niamey, and the worst in 30 years hit the former capital, Zinder. Over 50,000 animals perished. Around 9,000 families have been made homeless. There have been outbreaks of cholera in all three of the regions where Save the Children works, and nearly 800 cases nationally. There have been threats against foreigners, seven people have been kidnapped, another person tragically executed.

Every week there’s been something new to deal with. There are days when it’s felt like being in the apocalypse, and the idea that a few people could do anything to make this better just seemed farcical.

But then when you focus on the positives you realise how many of them there are:

• Dr Morou, working every single day at the clinic with children close to death but always ready with a grin when you arrive.
• International coverage of the crisis by reporters from BBC World and Today, Sky TV, ABC, and more, who have work so hard to get this in the news.
• The generosity of people in the UK who have given their money to a country they’ll probably never visit and may never have heard of before. Thanks to them we have £150,000 more to spend then we did when I arrived.

Djamila playing with my sunglasses and posing for a photo

And the children can tell you that, despite the appalling numbers, there’s a lot to be happy about. Djamila, who earlier this year was begging on the street is now back in her village and hoping to return to school. Tsiharou, who struggled to breathe without oxygen three months ago, is now healthy and at home. Rahina, who was barely conscious when she was brought to us, is now getting regular medical treatment in her village and plays with her family.

And now the rains have ended. The harvest has begun; in most places it’s a good one. Rates of malaria are starting to drop. Malnutrition rates will soon start to drop too, as children who were beginning to suffer are saved from becoming critically ill with the new abundance of food, and critically ill children are nursed back to health. The price of cereals in the market are lower than the average for this time of year. Animals are fattening.

This is the time when the real work begins though. Niger is the least developed country in the world. There’s one hospital in the entire country. Families think going hungry for four months is normal. People’s lives are threatened because it doesn’t rain. People’s lives are threatened because it does.

It’s not the apocalypse here though. It’s nothing like it. It’s poverty. We can’t make the rain fall where and when it’s needed, but we can stop it mattering so much.

Building families’ resilience so they’re not living such a marginal existence will mean that when another harvest fails — and it will — they can cope. We need to invest in families now to put back what has been lost during the crisis. People are in debt; they’ve sold everything for food. And we need to invest systems too — in better access to clean water, health care, farming techniques, micro-credit schemes and schools — so that in the future, Niger’s population don’t suffer.

But, after just ten days of treatment, his health had improved so much that he was able to feed, smile and play.

At the time, his mother Salmey told us: “When we first arrived, he was barely even conscious of what was happening, but now he’s doing much better and he is getting his health back.

“Before, I couldn’t even smile. When I brought him in he was suffering so much that I couldn’t smile. But now he’s getting his health back, and I’m smiling again.”

This week we went to see Tsiharou in his village. It took three hours to drive there from the nearest city, first along a tarmacked road, then a gravel road, then a sand path that weaves over dunes through the slender ripe millet, and then a short walk to a clearing with three mud brick houses and a yard.

We sat together with Tsahirou and Salmey, his mum, on a blue mat under a shady tree. The fragile, skeletal baby had been replaced by a healthy round little boy. It was wonderful to see.

“When I went there to the Aguie health centre Tsiharou didn’t know where he was, what was going on,”  Salmey told me. “He received treatment for many things. I stayed there with him for 26 days.

“Since he left the health centre he has had no problems. He is healthy, but each month I go to the health centre at Aikawa. I get medicine for his cough. His cough has never gone away completely; he coughs more after the rain. Yesterday he had a fever, the first time since we left the health centre, but it’s gone away today.”

Overall, it’s been a good growing season. Crops are ripening, the landscape is green. In some places the harvest has already started.

Salmey and Tsiharou are surrounded by strong tall millet and sorghum stems; their food for the coming year. The rainy season in Niger is coming to an end, and the drier air should give Tsiharou the opportunity to recover completely.

But the problems in Niger are far from over. Around 7 million people have suffered from the lack of food this year – an emergency of that size doesn’t go away overnight.

And the crops in Salmey’s field won’t be enough to see her through until the 2011 harvest. But now, even while there’s still vulnerability, there’s also health and hope in this village.

It’s a good reminder to stop and think about the 200,000 children who have needed emergency care this year and who have received it, and to smile at the thought of the vast majority of those children who are now able to play with their mother under a tree.

You can help us ‘press for change‘ to tell world leaders that it’s now or never to stop children dying like they promised the world’s poorest in 2000.

Find out more about Niger’s food crisis

It was amazing to see the pictures that dropped into my inbox from a colleague in Niger. It took me a little while to recognise little Tsahirou.

When I first met him in one of Save the Children’s clinics for severely malnourished children his little chest was concave as he struggled to breathe. His mother, Salmey, sat on his bed looking extremely worried about her baby boy. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I don’t know if my child is going to make it.” I could understand why she felt like this. He was certainly one of the most severe cases in the clinic.

A month later I went back to the clinic to find Tsahirou and see how he was getting on. I couldn’t believe it when Dr Morou, the doctor in charge of the clinic, told me he’d been discharged. He described the amazing change in Tsahirou as a result of the simple treatment he’d been given. It was difficult to believe.

It’s incredible to see this transformation for real in the photograph and to hear that Tsahirou is at home healthy and really well nearly three months after I’d met him.

However, an increasing number of children are needing emergency feeding in Niger. Almost 2,500 under-5s are pouring into feeding centres across Niger each week – a four fold increase since the start of the year. Children like Tsahriou.

This is as the United Nations meet in New York to review how they’re doing on the promises (Millennium Development Goals) they made in 2000 to the world’s poorest countries. If we’re to cut by two thirds the number of children who die each year before they reach their fifth birthday then we have to do more to help children in countries like Niger.

Niger is not a basket case — it’s actually the story of fragile progress. Its position on a list of ‘high achievers’ seems improbable, particularly as the country is currently in the throes of a catastrophic food crisis affecting children like Tsahirou. Yet, against this fragile backdrop, between 1998 and 2006 Niger’s under-5 mortality rate has dropped by 28%.

Niger’s improvement must be seen relative to its starting point. Twenty years ago Niger had the highest under-five mortality rate in the world and today it’s ranked 13th from the bottom – so a lot more needs to be done to stop children dying. Food crises like Niger has been experiencing are only going to hinder any progress.

But Niger has shown that it can be done. We just need the will to do it.

You can help us ‘press for change‘ to tell world leaders that it’s now or never to stop children dying like they promised the world’s poorest in 2000.

Find out more about Niger’s food crisis

In Niger, it rains heavily and -  if you’re poor, and you probably are – it’s economic breakdown. The price of your house crashes (as your house collapses). Your savings account is wiped out (as your livestock drown). You lost your job last October (when the last harvest failed) and your new enterprise just fell through (as newly-planted crops are submerged).

You have no house, no job, no money, no food and no means of getting any. And then your baby, who has been growing weaker every day, becomes sick, and you can’t afford the treatment.

This nightmare is unfolding right now for families across Niger. The failed harvest, rising food prices, and subsequent crisis have already caused malnutrition levels to rocket past emergency thresholds. Now the rains are compounding the situation by spreading diseases that contribute to malnutrition, and which malnourished children are too weak to fight off. It’s a viscous circle, a downward spiral.

Last week, 2,400 children were brought to Save the Children with severe malnutrition.

That’s 450 more children than the week before.

800 more children than five weeks ago.

Almost 1,800 more children than in the last week of January.

This emergency hasn’t gone away. It’s still six weeks until the next harvest and it’s too soon to know how successful that will be. While 110,000 families have already been affected by floods, in other places families are suffering drought, in other places they’re fine. It’s erratic, it can change, but even if the harvest is successful this emergency won’t just stop. 

7,100,000 people here have spent six months without enough food. Imagine if every person in Scotland didn’t have enough food for six months. Imagine what that would do to productivity, health, small businesses, social and family relations. Imagine the riots, the outcry from permanently hungry people who were educated and outraged and wealthy enough to have their voices heard. Now add another 2 million people to that, and imagine how loudly the Nigeriens would be shouting if they could.

And a poor harvest last year doesn’t only mean hungry people this year. It also means a lack of good seed to plant now, as the good seeds were used up last year. It means animals – savings accounts – have been without fodder for a year and their value has plummeted. It means 141,000 children have been so hungry and so ill for so long that they’ve needed medical care. For some parents it’s meant the death of their child. 

This crisis won’t go away overnight and it won’t be solved with a few weeks of good meals. Families in Niger need food and health care now, but they also need support to help them recover from this crisis. That recovery work has to start when the harvest comes, in just six weeks, which means funding has to be made available now to prevent the impact of crisis from being prolongued.

Donate to our Niger appeal

Find out more about Niger

It’s a single room. It’s surprisingly light, with a sand floor, a bed, a cot with a blue mosquito net hanging above, and a painted cabinet full of pots and pans.  It’s plain and simple, a piece of sacking covers the window, but there’s also bright wallpaper, beige with bright red and pink art deco flowers.

This is Abuda’s house. Abuda is twenty-seven and she lives here with her seven month old son, Darrida. We’re in the village of Farountsoho, about 50 km away from Zinder, the second largest town in Niger.

Abuda has so little. Her kitchen is an open fire in the yard outside, her bathroom is an area beside the house shielded from view by a screen woven from leaves; her other set of clothes hang by the bed. But she’s house proud. On her one thin shelf some empty soap boxes have been saved and displayed as decoration, the beds are made, the sand floor is clear of debris and pebbles.

And Abuda is being the best mother she can be. The mosquito net is above her baby’s bed, not hers. She explains ‘I borrowed it from my neighbour when I was pregnant’. She’s breastfeeding her baby, she knows it’s the best way for him to be healthy. She makes and sells bean cakes by the road to bring in some extra income despite the fierce desert heat.  And she’s planning her future income too. Abuda borrowed a goat from a neighbour to rear; “I will keep this goat until I have the goat’s baby. Then the owner will give the baby to me.”  She’ll then be able to start her own flock.

Women like Abuda live all over Niger. With almost no education, support, or resources they’re still coming up with intelligent ways to support themselves and their families. They’re enterprising and they’re finding their own ways out of poverty, but they live in one of the hardest places in the world.

I met Abuda just over a week ago. It’s possible the roof of her house has collapsed since then, destroying the few things she owned, drowning the baby goat, and leaving both Abuda and Darrida exposed to disease.  Heavy rainfall across Niger has already waterlogged and dissolved homes, flooded fields, killed over 50,000 animals.

I don’t know if that’s happened to Abuda. But if it has, how can she recover? Not only would she have lost the little she had, she will also have gained debts – the goat, the mosquito net. How could she cook bean cakes on an open fire in an open yard in a storm? Who would stop to buy them?

Families like this need support. They’re trying hard, but with so little they’re still vulnerable. One heavy storm can destroy their lives. Save the Children are working in Abuda’s community. She has access to free healthcare at the clinic five kilometres away. Our staff know the poorest families, they visit every few weeks to monitor their situation and see what help they can give.  And, come October, we’re planning on following Abuda’s lead by giving goats to the poorest families on the understanding that the first kids go to another poor family in the village so everyone benefits.

Find out about our work in Niger

Donate to our Niger appeal

Most are extremely poor – a combination of regular poor harvests which yield little and a hand to mouth existence when the harvests are good.

It goes something like this. Every September/ October when the harvest (however much or little there is) comes in, farmers have to sell their millet and sorghum immediately to make sure they have enough money to live and to pay off debts.

The trouble is this is the time of year when prices are at their lowest because there’s a lot of grain available (relatively speaking) so farmers make very little, if any, profit.

Furthermore, because most Nigerien farmers have nowhere to stock large supplies, farmers, frustratingly, end up having to buy back their own grain later in the year from traders at highly inflated prices to feed their families.

But things are beginning to change. Niger’s farmers are starting to use a system called “warrantage”. They stock their grain in community granaries while receiving credit (at low interest rates) on their harvest from local credit agencies.

This means they can store their grain until May when prices traditionally rise and they can sell it at a profit. Until now, any profit from selling in May has gone to traders who have bought up the grain in the Autumn at cost price.

But under the new system, the farmer can use his profits to pay off loans and any surplus can then be invested in other income generating schemes like buying sheep or goats.

Another bonus of the new approach is that farmers are increasingly able to store enough grain to feed their families during the year – avoiding the deeply frustrating need to buy their own grain back from the traders.

It’s taking time for warrantage to take off but Save the Children is working with both farmers and loan agencies in Maradi, one of the regions worst affected by the brutal food crisis blighting the country – to get it off the ground.

It could well prove to be one way the people of Niger, the least developed country in the world, begin to lift themselves out of poverty.

Find out more about what we are doing in Niger

Donate to our Niger appeal