Once again, Nigeria has been caught off guard by the withdrawal of funding from multilateral and bilateral agencies for the care of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the country. The discontinuation is a result of the significant funding gap, particularly with key donors like the United States, which has not only reduced its contributions to the United Nations (UN) and its agencies but withdrew funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) operations worldwide.
Already, it is having direct and immediate impact on the lives of IDPs in Nigeria as the provision of essential services like food, healthcare and security are being curtailed, leading to increased hardship, hunger and a worsening humanitarian crisis.
Ordinarily, USAID funding had significantly impacted IDPs as they provided food assistance, malnutrition treatment, and safe drinking water projects. But with the elimination, there are manifest realities of increasing malnutrition, chiefly among children and nursing mothers, as majority of the IDPs have lost access to essential healthcare and humanitarian services, including job losses for community health workers.
UN agencies winding up their activities or scaling them down include UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), World Food Programme (WFP) and International Organisation for Migration (IOM). UNOCHA’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Professor Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda, had on April 16 announced the agency’s decision to pull out of Nigeria. On April 11, the agency’s head, Tom Fletcher, in a letter to staff shared on UNOCHA’s platform, revealed “brutal cuts” of nearly $60 million in funding shortfall for 2025, affecting operations in Nigeria and eight other nations.
Similarly, the WFP had on March 28 warned that 58 million people risk losing life-saving assistance in the agency’s 28 most critical crisis response operations due to “a steep decline in funding across its major donors.” Rania Dagash-Kamara, WFP Assistant Executive Director for Partnerships and Innovation, had said this was because of an alarming 40 per cent drop in funding for 2025, compared to last year.
According to the Humanitarian Data Exchange, there are about 4,365,591 IDPs scattered in 266 camps and camp-like settlements in Nigeria, while there are a total of 2,033 locations where IDPs live among host communities. Another source indicates 309 camps and camp-like settings housing 40% of IDPs, with 60% living in host communities. Additionally, a specific location, Maiduguri, was reported to have 32 registered IDP camps.
The unfortunate situation is that while USAID, UNOCHA and WFP were providing the life-saving assistance, Nigeria’s humanitarian agencies including Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, and Poverty Reduction, with its lead agencies – National Commission for Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI), National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) – were caught napping. This created the gaping exposure whereby the nation’s IDPs are facing hunger and deprivation as a result of withdrawal of foreign food and other interventions.
The question that remains germane is: Why would Nigeria abdicate its responsibilities and rely on USAID and UN agencies to feed the people and take care of their health in the first place? What happens to the budgets of federal and state ministries of humanitarian affairs, and why are victims forced to flee to IDP camps not benefiting from the budgetary allocations? Yet, there had been reports of goods rotting in NEMA’s warehouses.
This pathetic inability to take care of our citizens and leaving them in the hands of foreigners and UN agencies is indeed embarrassing.
We at Daily Trust therefore call on the federal government to rise above proclamations or intentions and take concrete measures to fill the gap that the withdrawal of UN agencies and USAID has creating. Towards this, NEMA and other intervention agencies must rise to the challenge.
We also call for a coherent policy on funding and care of IDPs, which will stop the exacerbating dire situation of hunger and lack of essential services, which is becoming a permanent feature of the camps. It is the duty of the federal government, working in conjunction with state and local governments, to ensure that citizens are not left to suffer due to no fault of theirs, especially vulnerable populations of children, women and those with disabilities being left without essential support.
Moreover, there is a need to stop the attacks, killings and destruction by non-state actors and curtail the effects of natural disasters, such as flood-affected communities that fuel the population of IDPs and make it difficult for them to go back to their communities.
There should be concerted efforts to stabilise the security situation to enable displaced Nigerians to return to their ancestral homes and go back to their farms and at least feed themselves and their families.
Home-grown assistance should be mobilised immediately as a situation where they are left to their own fate is inhuman, as some of them, who venture out of the IDP camps into the bush or forest to gather firewood or burn woods to make charcoal to sell in order to buy food for families, have been victims of brutal attacks, killings, rape and other forms of assault.
The fate of IDPs in Benue State is most pathetic and demands urgent attention, as some were last supplied food from the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) in January this year, a situation blamed on lack of allocation to local governments from the Federation Account for February and March, from where SEMA gets its funding.
We also call on civil society organisations (CSOs) to join in fostering collaboration between Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and local communities to promote good governance which reduces the incidence of IDPs.
The withdrawal of foreign or multilateral funding for IDPs should be an opportunity for Nigerian governments to come together and find home-grown solutions.