Red Cross: Prostitution Thriving In North East As Women Struggle To Keep Their Children Alive

Before its latest report, the ICRC had warned of severe malnutrition and starvation faced by Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) while some officials of government have been accused of diverting aid meant for the displaced persons.

ICRC attributed it to an insurgency by Boko Haram fighters that had driven millions “The violence has displaced over 2.4 million people across the swamp lands of Lake Chad, where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria meet, and disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of others,” the agency said.

“It’s extraordinary to see a woman and her family and they have nothing other than what they have been given,” Simon Brooks, head of ICRC’s delegation in Cameroon, said.

“The children are clearly malnourished and it’s just hopeless.

“When you don’t have the means to survive, you’ll go begging for it,” he said.

“It’s a loss of dignity when you’re having to resort to something like that just to keep your children alive – fraternising with people who have money,” Brooks said.

She observed that as the head of their households, some mothers have been forced to prostitute so they could feed their family, since many no longer have husbands because of the conflict.

Brooks bemoaned the fact that the Boko Haram conflict though very gripping in terms of the human tragedy, it merely made international headlines.

“Overshadowed by the wars in Syria and Iraq and the global refugee and migrant crisis, Lake Chad has barely made the headlines,’’ Brooks said during an interview in London.

“Half a million children are severely acutely malnourished and on the brink of death if they are not treated.

“This area has suffered from decades of chronic neglect … if it continues to be under-funded and under-reported, then millions of people will continue to suffer.”