UN: Floods affect 35,000 people in conflict-hit North East

Some 35,000 people were affected by flooding in a conflict-torn part of northeast Nigeria, and more than half of them were displaced, a UN spokesman said on Friday.

“Our humanitarian colleagues tell us that more than 35,000 people have been affected — with 19,000 people displaced — by the worst flooding in seven years in northeast Nigeria’s Adamawa state,” said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Haq said the Nigerian government was leading the aid response and providing shelter for those in need, while the United Nations and its aid partners are helping out by providing water, hygiene kits, and essential drugs and other supplies.

Adamawa is one of the states most affected by the decade-long conflict in northeast Nigeria, the spokesman said. Some 7.1 million people are still in need of urgent assistance. The 2019 Humanitarian Response Plan for Nigeria seeks 848 million U.S. dollars to help 6.2 million people, but it is only 59 percent funded, he told a regular press briefing.

More than 27,000 people have been killed and thousands of women and girls abducted since the conflict began in 2009, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Some 1.8 million Nigerians have fled from their homes and are internally displaced, the majority of them in Borno State to the north of Adamawa.