Scenes on the road between Tahoua and Abalak in Niger, Africa. Photograph: Dan Chung
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Stéphanie Savariaud is a press officer for the World Food Programme in Niger. She wrote last weekend about Niger's food crisis. Here she describes the struggle to deliver aid:
The phone has not stopped ringing since last week, and journalists and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are still boarding planes to come to Niger.
The focus for everybody is now on distributions. Food has arrived with our partners, more is still arriving, and we all need to move very quickly.
Trucks are on the roads but the rainy season has started, and it sometimes seems a titanic task to get a truck or a car across a path that has turned into a small river.
A 4x4 we were following from Tahoua to the small village of Barmou to see some distributions slipped into the water; the story ended well, but it made me realise how difficult these deliveries are.
I went back to Tillabéry to see one of our partners distributing high energy biscuits to children in the villages. They look like normal biscuits but one 250g packet contains 950 kilocalories (about half the daily need in an emergency situation). Some little girls in a village near Tillabéry were munching on them and smiling, and it was comforting to see.
I asked whether aid had been delivered to the village where Lukeman lives - the three-year-old boy with big eyes I wrote about last week. I was told that his village was in the zone covered by the international NGO Plan, so that was also comforting.
WFP is now looking at helping 2.5 million people in coordination with the government and with Plan. In August, WFP will target 1.85 million people, the government 700,000 and Plan 100,000 for a first-round distribution of food by NGOs on the ground.
WFP will then conduct a second round of distributions in the two most critical zones of the country. We can still save lives, but the problems in Niger are far too complex to be solved simply by distributing food.
At the Médecins Sans Frontières centre in Tahoua, there was a little girl with a terrible eye cancer, and the doctors were not optimistic. She had been given traditional medicine in her village to cure an infection.
Poor water quality, limited access to healthcare and a small proportion of land suitable for agriculture mean that much more must be done to help Niger for a long time to come.
