Health facilities juggling rising cases of infant hunger, malaria, in an area that also shelters thousands of refugees.
Rising cases of extreme infant hunger and malaria are overwhelming humanitarian facilities in southwestern Ethiopia as aid cuts force other nutrition and disease prevention programmes to shutter, Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF) has warned.
MSF said on Wednesday it had seen a 55-percent increase compared with last year in child admissions to its feeding centre in the Kule refugee camp in Ethiopia’s Gambella region, with many of the infants coming from camps nearby.
Funding cuts have meant the closure of nutrition services in four of the region’s seven refugee camps, MSF said, “leaving around 80,000 children under the age of five at risk of life-threatening malnutrition”.
Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation with about 130 million people, is grappling with armed clashes in two of its largest regions.
