Niger’s crop crisis impacts schooling: DRR strategies urged
Niger's food crisis has caused mass displacement among its people. The UN warns that school attendance rates have fallen as a result, and has urged that disaster reduction strategies be employed.
The food crisis in the poor African nation of Niger has reached new level of urgency. As more families have been forced to flee the worsening drought in search of food, fewer and fewer children are able to attend school.
Drought, caused by the failure of seasonal rains, has left 60% of Niger’s population under threat of famine—that’s 7.8 million people.
The threat of famine has meant that many children have had no choice but to abandon their studies and follow their mothers and fathers to Sudan. More than 19 000 children are out of school for this reason. United Nations humanitarian and development aid agencies say that faced with this situation, children are vulnerable to child labour, child marriage and other forms of exploitation or abuse.
Today, Niger has some of the worst human development indicators in the world. Only 37% of adults are literate and school attendance and enrolment rates are abysmally low at only 38%. Continual food shortages caused by drought and desertification have derailed progress toward economic development because the population cannot meet their most basic needs.
The United Nations is doing its best to make sure that those students in their final year of primary school finish out the year to write their entrance exams to secondary school. Reuters reports that Niger’s administration has been advised to pursue disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies to try and limit the impact of famine through prevention and quick response. One common DRR strategy is a famine early warning system, which uses technology to assess hydrometeorological and geographical vulnerabilities to drought and famine. According to critiques of the Hyogo Framework for Action on DRR, drought constitutes an international policy protection gap, though it remains Africa’s most pressing disaster threat.
Two-thirds of the Niger is covered by the Sahara Desert. Small-scale measures such as agro-forestry have proven effective in turning back the desert’s creep forward while increasing crop yields at the same time. Agro-forestry is the practice of planting of nutrient-rich trees or shrubs that act as a fertilizer-substitute in amongst the regular crops—an inexpensive and valuable tool for a country that has faced successive crop failures over the past few years.