Will the world let children of Niger die?

Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding centre. But aid groups despair that so many other children — among the most vulnerable in times of crisis — are dying because the world was slow to respond.

"I thought we would not make it safely," said Haoua Adamou, Nasseiba’s grandmother, speaking in Hausa through an interpreter. Adamou had walked several hours from her village with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding centre at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey. She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba’s face.

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The UN’s humanitarian agency estimates some 800,000 children under five are suffering from hunger, including 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition.

The warnings have been coming for months. The United Nations first appealed for assistance in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for US$16 million in March got about US$1 million. The latest appeal on May 25 for US$30 million has received about $10 million.

Donations jumped dramatically in the last week because, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday, of increased media attention and TV images of starving children. Egeland estimated thousands of children are dying in Niger.

Nasseiba dozed, at first fitfully, in the intensive care tent of the emergency centre erected by Doctors Without Borders in Maradi, where 55 other chronically malnourished children were receiving care. Her mother, who is three months pregnant, and her father stayed behind to work their farm, hoping to coax something from the dry soil come the October harvest.

Nasseiba tried several times to pull out the tiny feeding tube securely taped to her forehead and running down into her nose. She found sleep after several meager mouthfuls of enriched formula and what looked like a long, cold stare, sign of her troubled vision that leaves her blind at night. Just a few steps from the critically sick, another ward sheltered children who have almost recovered.

Two-year-old Tsclaha has survived the critical 48 hours since her admission, when she weighed just 13.2 pounds. It will take her days to reach her target weight of 16 pounds before being declared fully cured.

Tsclaha, barely able to stand on wobbly legs, happily munched a ready to eat, highly nutritious peanut butter mixture. Tsclaha wore a red bracelet, signaling doctors had decided to admit her. Nearby, 40 women carrying children waited anxiously for them to be weighed and for doctors to decide which ones would get red bracelets, which ones the orange or yellow bracelets that meant that, though considered malnourished, they were well enough to be sent home with supplies of flour and cooking oil.

Outside the MSF centre, new tents are being set up to ease up the burden on the already stretched facility, where nurses work round the clock to diagnose the 300 hungry children who come daily from surrounding villages.

A 16-tonne shipment of oil, sugar, and nutritional paste arrived in Maradi from France on Thursday and several more shipments were scheduled, the UN World Food Programme said.

But the need is great and growing in this desert nation of 11.3 million regularly ranked among the world’s least developed. When the first appeal was made, only US$1 per day and per person would have helped solve the food crisis, the UN has said. Now that the situation has worsened and people are weaker, US$80 will be needed per person.

"It’s the worst I’ve seen so far," said Hassan Balla, a primary school teacher in Tarna, a village just outside Maradi.

"What is happening is really ugly," he said. "I’ve seen people eat leaves ... live like animals."

Balla, however, is optimistic.

"The world is generous," he said. "Our friends heard our cries. Do you think they will let us suffer when they are living comfortably?"