Boko Haram forces UNHCR to seek $135m

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, together with the UN Development Programme and other partners, has launched the 2019 Nigeria Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRRP), an appeal for $135m to help hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the worsening Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin region.

With more than 250,000 children, women and men already uprooted from northeast Nigeria, surging militant attacks targeting civilians are forcing thousands more to run for their lives each day.

Young girls, old women and aid workers continue to bear the brunt of this escalating violence.

A recent upsurge in violence in northeast Nigeria has driven more than 80,000 civilians to seek refuge in already crowded camps or in towns in Borno State where they are surviving in tough living conditions.

Nigerian refugees continue to arrive in very remote and impoverished communities in neighbouring countries. An estimated 30,000 fled the city of Rann last weekend alone to seek refuge across the Cameroonian border.

Thousands have also fled to neighbouring Cameroon and Chad in recent weeks. The hostilities have strained humanitarian operations there and forced aid workers to pull out from some locations. The destruction of livelihoods and infrastructure is widespread.

The escalation in the conflict has thwarted people’s intention of returning to their homes. Some refugees that attempted to return to their homes and communities have become displaced multiple times inside Nigeria or have become refugees a second time in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

The newly launched aid appeal aims to broaden the humanitarian response towards a longer-term approach - to support those forced to flee and the communities hosting them. Refugee hosting communities are already living below the poverty line and in dire need of aid themselves with their ability to help the displaced being stretched to the limit.

The 40 UN agencies and humanitarian organizations that joined the 2019 Nigeria Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRRP) will cater for the needs of a quarter million Nigerian refugees and 55,000 of their hosts in Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

A total of some 2.5 million people are displaced across the Lake Chad region including more than 1.8 million inside Nigeria.

A Refugee Response Plan (RRP) is a UNHCR-led, inter-agency planning and coordination tool for large-scale or complex refugee situations. A similar appeal of $157m launched in 2018 was only 42 percent funded, compared to 56 percent of the $241m needed in 2017.

The UN and its partners are also seeking $848m to continue providing food, water, shelter and protection to the most vulnerable people in Nigeria as part of the 2019-2021 Humanitarian Response Strategy for the country.