Nigeria

Young survivor

Dauda is 10 years old. He is from Bama, Borno State, northeast Nigeria. Today, he lives at a transit centre, the temporary home for hundreds of children and women, the survivors of the armed conflict in northeast Nigeria.

“I still remember the day when my village was attacked and I was separated from my parents,” recalls Dauda. “My father was selling firewood and my mother foodstuffs. Me and my brothers were attending qur’anic school.”

“We were ordered to follow the armed fighters and we knew that we would have been killed if we would have resisted,” he says describing a difficult journey into Sambisa forest, the camp for the non-state armed groups and the place where he was kept for more than two years.

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Lydia is unsure of her age. She never learned how to read or write and fails to guess how old she is. I too fail when she tells me that she has given birth to 7 children. Only three of them are alive today. Lydia is petite, with smooth flawless skin and not a wrinkle in sight. “Maybe I’m 20, or maybe I’m 30,” she says with an attempted smile that fails to reach her eyes. Her eyes are dark and speak of the horrors she has been through, long before she opens her mouth.

Multimedia

Medium: Making schools safer and children more confident

What we do

UNICEF aims to accelerate the realization of the rights of all children and women to survival, development, protection and participation. We promote efforts to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality; expand access to quality basic education; and strengthen social and child protection systems, using a rights-based and gender-sensitive approach.

New publications

Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2016-17, Survey Findings Report

Early Moments Matter for Every Child

Evaluation of the Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Week in Nigeria