Protecting Livelihoods of Farmers, Pastoralists Around Lake Chad
In the two decades before 2015, West Africa made notable strides in reducing hunger, reducing the number of hungry people by more than 60 per cent, well ahead of its Millennium Development Goal pledge.
Yet today in Nigeria--one of the region's star performers in that period--we now see severe hunger increasingly quickly and widely in north-eastern regions where civil conflict is uprooting people and preventing farmers from growing crops.
There is a growing risk that the impressive gains made recently will be reversed. We cannot let so much effort turn out to have been in vain.
I am visiting the Lake Chad Basin at this particular moment to raise awareness of just how urgently we must strengthen our response to the challenges there. So far, the inadequate attention and inadequate responses have only made those challenges bigger.
Stuart Rankin/NASA