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Add to Preferred SourcesViolence has been ongoing in northeast Nigeria since the Boko Haram insurgency erupted in 2009, forcing more than 2.5 million people from their homes within the Lake Chad Basin in a desperate search for safety.
As the insurgency grinds on, thousands have been displaced several times within Nigeria itself, while thousands of others have sought safety over the border on numerous occasions.
The vast majority of the recent arrivals fled during a single weekend, 26-27 January, crossing the El-Beid River en masse, some with a few belongings packed on to donkey carts, others carrying them on their heads.
“In this remote and desert environment, the needs are tremendously great in number,” says Geert Van de Casteele, the assistant representative in Cameroon for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, who traveled to Goura to meet new arrivals and assess their needs.
“It is about providing healthcare, food, water, and medical assistance and to rapidly find resources with which to construct a temporary shelter in a region characterised by particularly rough climate conditions,” he adds.
Together with the UN Development Programme and other partners, UNHCR has launched an appeal for US$135 million to help the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the worsening Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin region.
Urgent action is needed in order to support the small West African nation, which already hosts 400,000 refugees, including some 135,000 Nigerians.
Gaelle Massack, UNHCR External Relations officer in Cameroon hopes and prays that the needs of all the refugees, in all sectors, will be met.
“After having witnessed so much suffering, and after seeing the hope that they’re desperately clinging onto, we’re only thinking of one thing: To see them stand on their own two feet again, And have a better life, than the one they left behind in Nigeria.”
Original source: UNHCR
Published on 11 February 2019