Northern Nigeria Hunger Hits Worst Level in Nearly a Decade.

More than 17 million people across nine states in northern Nigeria are now living through crisis, emergency or catastrophic hunger, an increase of almost two million in a single projection cycle. The figure, from the latest Cadre Harmonise food security analysis cited by the World Food Programme, marks the worst hunger the region has seen in nearly a decade.

The northern Nigeria hunger crisis is being driven by two forces pulling in the same direction: spreading conflict and shrinking aid. In Borno state, the epicentre of insurgent violence, more than three million people are acutely food insecure. Over 750,000 of them are in severe hunger, and more than 10,000 have tipped into catastrophic conditions, the most extreme classification on the scale, where starvation and death are already present.

The access problem is compounding the funding problem. WFP says the number of locations its frontline staff cannot reach has doubled, with 15 further areas now partially inaccessible. Across three northeastern states, 6.2 million people are food insecure, yet WFP can currently support only 740,000 of them. That leaves 5.5 million people, many of them children, without lifesaving food and nutrition assistance. A year ago, at the height of the 2025 lean season, the agency was reaching 1.3 million.

The math of that collapse is brutal in its simplicity. As funding fell, coverage fell with it, and the gap did not disappear, it moved onto the plates of families who now have nothing. WFP says it needs 89 million dollars over the next six months to sustain food, nutrition and logistics support before hunger deepens further into the lean season.

The timing is the danger. Hunger in this region follows a calendar, peaking in the months before harvest when household stocks run out. Aid organisations know this window is coming, which is what makes an 89 million dollar shortfall so preventable and so costly if it is not closed. The people counted in that 5.5 million gap are not an abstraction. They are the direct arithmetic of a funding decision that has not yet been made.

Sources: WFP news release, conflict and shrinking humanitarian assistance drives northern Nigeria hunger crisis (wfp.org); WFP Nigeria country page (wfp.org).