THE humanitarian crisis in Sokoto’s internally displaced persons (IDP) camps is deepening as global aid shrinks and donor support declines. The ICIR examines how funding cuts are worsening living conditions for displaced families who once relied on assistance from international and donor-funded organisations.
When the rains fall, they pour directly on Aisha Garba’s head through the leaking roof in her makeshift mud house in Ramen Kura, IDP camp in Sokoto state. For three years, the 50-year-old and her five children have called the crowded camp home after fleeing bandit attacks in Rijiya village, Isa Local Government Area.
Life in the camp was never easy, but it was at least survivable when foreign aid was flowing. International NGOs supported by foreign organisations, such as USAID, once delivered rice, noodles, macaroni, and even small cash gifts, which allowed Aisha to feed her children at least twice a day.
“But this year everything has changed. We are just managing. There is no support,” Aisha said.
On most days, Aisha relies on desperate measures like sending her children out to beg, borrowing food on credit from a woman who sells food, or mixing spoonfuls of rice with Garri just to stretch a meal.
“If they don’t get anything, I have to go out and ask for a loan. If I don’t get we will just manage our life,” she explains, adding, “Even if we get a hundred naira for one swallow I buy, how do you think one swallow will be enough for us?”
The consequences are damning. One of Aisha’s daughters fell gravely ill with diarrhoea and vomiting. After visits to three hospitals, doctors told her the child was battling ulcer caused by prolonged hunger. “I didn’t know ulcer comes from hunger. I have visited three hospitals with her before she got relief.”
Aisha and her family are only one of some five million people across northwest Nigeria suffering from malnourishment in what experts have called the region’s most severe food crisis in years.
The troubled region has, for a decade and a half, been in the throes of a conflict waged by the terrorists locally known as bandits, and prolonged insecurity has disrupted food supplies, resulting in a hunger crisis that state governments are struggling to contain.
Worsening the problem this year are the massive and brutal funding cuts affecting aid organisations, which have often stepped in to help by providing food assistance to the over 1.3 million displaced northwest Nigerians. Many of those organisations were dependent on funds from the United States, which, since February, has reduced contributions to aid programmes globally by about 90 per cent.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration froze foreign aid and cut support for aid groups deemed lifesaving – decisions that quickly turned into life-or-death realities for families like Aisha’s.
Nigeria is one of the largest beneficiaries of the aid on the African continent. In 2024, the country was the third-largest African recipient of development assistance from the United States Agency for International Development, receiving a total of $876 million. But with the suspension, the fates of thousands of IDPs in Sokoto and other parts of the Northwest are hanging on the balance.
When aid stop trickling
In March, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed what aid workers had feared: the Trump administration had cancelled 83 per cent of U.S. USAID programmes. He announced that while the agency had spent over $715 billion in international development over the years, America would now redirect those funds into domestic priorities.
By July, USAID was officially dissolved. Decades of global development work in health, education, and humanitarian response came to an abrupt halt, leaving an aching void in fragile economies and conflict-torn regions.
For developing nations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where public systems are underfunded and humanitarian crises are frequent, the move was devastating. The decision crippled health interventions, derailed nutrition and food security programmes, and emergency operations that had sustained millions of internally displaced persons. In Nigeria, where USAID had consistently been among the top donors for humanitarian and development aid, the aftershock was immediate and brutal.
Before the cuts, USAID had poured millions of dollars into Nigeria’s northwest — one of the country’s most underserved regions. Sokoto State, plagued by years of banditry and displacement, had been a key beneficiary of U.S. humanitarian funding.
Through partnerships with the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, and local NGOs, USAID supported life-saving nutrition and health interventions across dozens of IDP settlements in Sokoto and its border communities. These projects provided therapeutic feeding for malnourished children, maternal health services for women, clean water, and emergency food assistance for thousands displaced by armed violence.
By late 2024, the humanitarian situation in Sokoto was already fragile. Floods, poor harvests, and intensifying attacks by armed groups had displaced more than 18,000 people across the state, many of whom fled to informal camps in Wurno, Isa, and Goronyo LGAs.
When the U.S. abruptly halted its funding, those fragile gains began to unravel. Mobile nutrition centres that once dotted the dusty landscapes of Sokoto North and Rabah were forced to close. Community health workers trained under USAID-funded projects withdrew their services, while several partner organisations including Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI), Grassroot Initiative for Strengthening Community Resilience (GISCOR), Finpact Development Foundation (FINDEF), Neem Foundation, and the International NGO Safety Organisation (INSO) were severely affected.
“Sequel to the stop work order by the US President, some humanitarian organisations were vacating the IDPs camp, and it affected the vulnerable population much more,” an NGO worker told The ICIR.
In March, UNICEF warned that critical nutrition supplies for acutely malnourished children were rapidly dwindling in Nigeria and Ethiopia. USAID had been the largest single donor bridging that gap. Its sudden withdrawal left agencies scrambling to reallocate limited resources from other regions, often forcing them to suspend operations in less accessible communities.
Analysts argue that the executive order exposed how dependent Nigeria’s humanitarian system had become on foreign aid, particularly from the U.S. For years, successive governments had failed to fund emergency response and social protection systems adequately. When external support disappeared, there was no domestic safety net strong enough to cushion the blow.
The U.S. government had previously spent more than $600 million annually on Nigeria’s health and humanitarian programmes, much of it flowing through USAID. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, it invested nearly $2.8 billion in health-related assistance, spanning HIV/AIDS, malaria, nutrition, and maternal health. Sokoto and Zamfara — among the most affected states — were key targets of USAID’s “Feed the Future” and “Health Resilience” programmes.
Struggling parents, starving children
For Hassan Abubakar, a 44-year-old father of eight, displacement has stretched into its fourth year. He and his family fled their village in Rabah LGA of Sokoto State after bandit attacks made life unbearable.
“At first, we used to get financial and food support,” he recalled, adding: “They gave us wheat and even built toilets for us. But now everything has changed. It’s been almost a year since we received anything, and eight months since we got wheat.”
Now, with aid withdrawn and prices skyrocketing, life has become a daily battle. Many of the displaced, including Hassan, try to earn a little through manual labour in town. “Someone called me to go and cut a tree for him so I could get money to buy food for my children,” he said.
Farming, which once offered hope, has become another source of fear. Hassan planted millet this year, but harvesting feels like a death trap. Sometimes, before they reach the farm, they receive calls warning that bandits were approaching or that they had kidnapped some farmers while they were working.
The unharvested crops weigh heavily on him. Even though they are hungry and the millet is ripe, bandits will not allow them to harvest.
Two of his children now lie sick in bed, and medical support is out of reach. “If I had harvested, I would have sold the crops to pay for their treatment. But as I am talking to you, I am hungry, and my children are hungry too. Many nights, we sleep with empty stomachs.”
Rashida Muhammad has lived three years in the Ramin Kura camp, but she remembers with haunting clarity the night that drove her out of her home in Saturu village, Isa LGA of Sokoto State.
She had been hiding alone in her room when armed men burst in. “Why are you hiding here?” one of them demanded, pointing a gun at her.
Rashida tried to stay calm. They told her she would be married off to them, whether she agreed or not. She pushed back, saying she would not be the first woman dragged to their den. In the end, one of them threw ₦500 at her, instructing her to buy bread for her children, before warning that they would return the next day.
That night, she decided she could not wait for their return. By dawn, she gathered her children and fled her village.
Life in displacement has been another kind of struggle. At first, food assistance softened the blow, noodles, nut cake, and grains distributed by aid groups. But with many of those services frozen or withdrawn, Rashida said survival has become a daily gamble.
Her husband died during her years in the camp, leaving her to raise the children alone. When one of them recently fell gravely ill with fever, Rashida spent nearly ₦40,000 raised through contributions from fellow displaced families just to keep him alive.
“I can’t get the nutritional milk for him now,” she said, recalling how one of her children had once recovered with the free supplements provided by aid agencies. “Even if I want to collect the milk, I can’t get it for the second child.”
Aisha Abubakar’s seven children wake up not knowing when food will come every day. On some days, their first meal doesn’t arrive until after noon, and at night they may eat only around 8 p.m. “If we don’t get anything, we just go to bed hungrily,” she said.
Aisha, who fled her home in Tulluwa village of Rabah LGA, remembers when aid organisations still provided food and supplies. “Surely, we enjoyed our life when humanitarian organisations were helping us. But now we are in critical condition since they stopped coming.”
Her husband had been gravely ill and is yet to recover. Though aid groups once distributed nutritional milk, Aisha said she has not been able to get it for her children again. “I just came back from there and didn’t get it,” she explained.
Government’s response
Armed bandits have subjected people in the country’s North West to a reign of terror for close to a decade now as authorities struggle to contain the growing violence. They sack villages, sexually assault women, impose levies on communities, kill locals, and control a million-dollar kidnap-for-ransom enterprise to keep their operations running.
There are believed to be as many as 30,000 terrorists belonging to different camps in the region. They wield considerable influence in some rural areas, acting as the de facto authority. Locals live under their harsh laws in such places. They also go as far as imposing levies and forcing able-bodied men among the communities to work on their farms.
Since 2011, when the crisis escalated, over 20,000 lives have been lost to armed violence in the North West, according to data gathered by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project. The crisis has also displaced over 600,000 people across Kaduna, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, and Zamfara.
Before the insecurity, families in the region, particularly outside the urban metropolis of Sokoto, survived on subsistence farming, tilling plots of land, and selling surplus harvest. These days, that is hardly an option.
In rural areas not under army control, bandits operate as a sort of government, exploiting villagers to generate money.
As a result, many end up in IDP camps where they endure squalor and grapple with contaminated water, which poses a severe threat of waterborne diseases, including cholera, to the camp’s children and pregnant women.
The ICIR had earlier reported that many IDPs face financial constraints, most resort to seeking healthcare from local chemists and untrained traditional medicine practitioners for ailments like fever, malaria, or diarrhoea, as a visit to formal medical facilities is often beyond their means. The lack of financial resources extends its grip on education, depriving their children of schooling opportunities due to an inability to meet associated costs.
Amid this dire situation, humanitarian organisations often come as sort of form of relief. However, most of them, which are backed by foreign aid, have left or downsized.
According to Sokoto, Kastina, Zamfara, SMART Survey and Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Acute Malnutrition (AMN) Analysis survey, Sokoto is among the states with the highest number of malnourished children. Specifically, the report showed that 297,832 children were severely malnourished in the state in 2023.
As part of its strategy to address the alarming malnutrition cases in Sokoto, Governor Ahmed Aliyu, in July, said it has earmarked about N500 million to address the rising cases of severe acute malnutrition among children in the state. However, a crucial hurdle remains the uncertain release of these appropriated funds.
Data shows that 44 per cent of households in Sokoto State live below the poverty line of $1.90 per day, according to a 2021 study on the nutritional status of children under five. This dire situation translates to 11.2 per cent of children suffering from severe hunger and 18.8 per cent facing moderate hunger. The study also revealed a combined impact of poverty and hunger affecting a staggering 73 per cent of Sokoto households, far exceeding the national average of 45.4 per cent.
When compared to global and national averages, Sokoto falls short on measures of weight and height for age, indicating both immediate and long-term nutritional deficiencies, according to a 2022 study conducted in the department of paediatrics in Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto.
Speaking with The ICIR, the acting director of Sokoto State ministry of Humanitarian affairs, Salisu Abubakar, said several USAID-funded projects, including one known as Enhancing Coordination System Distance Response in Nigeria (ECODIN), were halted following the U.S. government’s decision to suspend foreign aid earlier in the year.
“It affects us seriously. There is one project called Enhancing Coordination System Distance Response in Nigeria (ECODIN) that we were about to integrate here after a meeting in Abuja, but it was suspended due to this issue of USAID.”
He explained that while the suspension disrupted the ministry’s plans, the state government sought to mitigate the impact by engaging other organisations carrying out similar interventions.
“We shifted the whole project to other organisations,” Abubakar noted, adding: “Some of them were already implementing their own programmes, so we asked if they could take on some of the responsibilities that USAID was handling. Some accepted, some didn’t.”
The director acknowledged that Sokoto had previously benefited from several USAID-supported projects in emergency response and humanitarian aid.
On how the state government is responding to the growing humanitarian needs, especially among internally displaced persons (IDPs), Abubakar said Sokoto has continued to offer limited assistance despite constraints.
NGOs lament halt of lifesaving projects
Umar Isah, former director of disaster management at the Sokoto State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) and now Executive Director of the LinkGate for Humanitarian Development Initiatives, said the funding halt has paralysed most aid programmes in the state.
“Due to the USAID issue from the United States President, we are having serious funding constraints. Most of the NGOs that were working under USAID funding can no longer operate, and our local partners don’t have the capacity to sustain the work.”
Isah noted that before the suspension, at least five international NGOs were actively responding to the needs of displaced persons in Sokoto through projects on nutrition, water and sanitation (WASH), shelter, and livelihood empowerment.
“Right now, it’s only Action Against Hunger and COOPI that are still responding to nutrition and emergency needs,” he said. “UNICEF is planning a multisectoral intervention in hard-to-reach areas, but it hasn’t started yet.
“In the health sector, the impact is total,” he said, stressing: “Nutrition interventions, WASH, food items, and non-food item distributions have almost 90 per cent stopped because NGOs like Christian Aid and others withdrew after the funding cut.”
Isah appealed to the Nigerian government and international donors to urgently step in before the humanitarian situation worsens further.
“Every local government in Sokoto has displaced people. Because of the economic hardship, they can’t cater for themselves. There is an urgent need for donors—both international and local—and the government to come to their aid.”
Ubaida Bello Muhammad, the founder of Hikima Community Mobilisation and Development Initiative in Sokoto, one of the organisations once supported by USAID, recalled how life in the IDP camps changed drastically after the U.S. Agency for International Development froze its aid programs.
“Before the freeze, there were a lot of projects going on—nutrition, maternal and child health, reproductive health, economic empowerment, even agricultural support. Thousands of women and children were benefiting, and Sokoto was a major hub for these interventions,” she explained.
“The instruction came suddenly—everyone was asked to shut down their systems and leave the office. It was the same with local NGOs like us. About 70 staff and over 60 community case workers lost their jobs that day, and the services to IDPs stopped completely. It was the end of their contract. That also meant the end of food, nutrition, and medical support for displaced families.”
Muhammad acknowledged that Sokoto state officials sometimes collaborate, but she criticised the over-reliance on foreign donors. “Local authorities are depending too heavily on international NGOs. When USAID froze its support, everything collapsed. It shows there was no backup plan.
“If this crisis is not addressed, we don’t know how it’s going to end. Women struggle after losing their husbands to bandit attacks. They can’t feed or clothe their children, and many risk dying along the way. It is very difficult, she said.”
Nurudeen Akewushola is an investigative reporter and fact-checker with The ICIR. He believes courageous in-depth investigative reporting is the key to social justice, accountability and good governance in society. You can reach him via nyahaya@icirnigeria.org and @NurudeenAkewus1 on Twitter.