In the overcrowded wards of therapeutic feeding centres across northern Nigeria, the tiny frames of children battling severe acute malnutrition offer a painful glimpse into a public health crisis that shows no signs of slowing.
While the seasonal spike in malnutrition cases has become an all-too-familiar pattern, medical professionals are now sounding a more urgent alarm: survival is no longer the only challenge; it’s what happens after treatment that could shape the rest of a child’s life.
“Malnutrition is not just a short-term emergency; it’s a lifelong struggle for many children. It affects brain development, delays motor skills, weakens immunity, and increases the risk of chronic illness,” a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Kano, Dr. Jamila Shuaibu Bello said.
From January to May, MSF said it admitted 24,784 children with severe acute malnutrition to inpatient therapeutic feeding centres and treated another 107,461 through outpatient facilities, a 13 percent increase over the same period last year.
At the peak of the crisis in 2024, MSF saw 76,000 malnourished children with medical complications and over 250,000 outpatient admissions, numbers that underscore the scale of a deepening emergency.
Traditionally, malnutrition responses in the country have focused on food, specifically, delivering high-nutrient therapeutic formulas and medical care to restore weight and stabilise complications. But MSF is now piloting two new interventions aimed at addressing the hidden scars left behind by starvation: paediatric physiotherapy and mental health support.
These approaches are driven by a recognition that while many children regain weight, they do not always recover their abilities.
According to MSF, a two-year-old child, Ummul Khairun Mohammed, treated for severe malnutrition in Kebbi State, is still unable to walk due to developmental delays caused by the illness. She is one of many children facing lingering effects that no amount of food alone can cure.
“In some children, even a few weeks of acute malnutrition can delay key developmental milestones like crawling and walking. If these issues aren’t addressed early, the damage can be irreversible,” MSF’s physiotherapist in Kano, Fatima Abdulmajid said.
With support from the MSF Foundation, paediatric physiotherapy programmes have been launched in parts of Kano and Katsina States. These involve guided exercises, play-based therapy, and home-based training for caregivers to help children rebuild strength, balance and motor skills.
Equally important is the emotional toll malnutrition takes on both children and their families. Caregivers often face guilt, stress and helplessness, while malnourished children can experience trauma, anxiety and withdrawal.
In response, MSF has integrated mental health services into its nutrition projects in states such as Zamfara, Borno, Kebbi, Bauchi, Sokoto, Katsina and Kano. These include play therapy, counselling and psychosocial support to help caregivers better understand and respond to their children’s emotional needs.
“Mental health support helps manage the child’s overall well-being, not just physical recovery. We stimulate emotional development and rebuild the bonds that malnutrition can break,” MSF’s mental health supervisor in Bauchi, Kauna Hope Bako, said.
The drivers of northern Nigeria’s malnutrition crisis are complex and persistent: chronic food insecurity, conflict and displacement, high inflation, weak healthcare infrastructure and disease outbreaks fuelled by low immunisation rates. The annual “lean season” from June to September only worsens the situation, as food becomes scarcer and disease transmission increases.
Despite the enormous scale of the problem, two million children, according to UNICEF, are estimated to be suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Nigeria.
In anticipation of the 2025 lean season, MSF has expanded its inpatient bed capacity, hired more staff and scaled up outpatient therapeutic centres. It has also intensified community education to promote early detection and treatment. Still, humanitarian actors warn that without a long-term, multi-sectoral approach, these efforts are only temporary solutions to a recurring emergency.
Experts have said that it is time to shift from emergency response to sustainable solutions that consider the full trajectory of a child’s recovery: physical, mental and social.
That means investing in healthcare, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, water and sanitation, education, conflict resolution and treating malnutrition not just as a medical problem, but as a developmental and societal crisis.
