How Conflict and Climate Change Deepen Child Malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa
16 October 2025
Author: Oche Joseph Otorkpa
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly one-third of children under five suffer from stunted growth, with rates of malnutrition rising fastest in areas scarred by armed conflict. The crisis is not merely one of food supply but of accessibility — a profoundly political issue that reveals how conflict, governance failures, climate disruption, and a strained humanitarian system intersect to deepen vulnerability. Under international humanitarian law, the starvation of civilians is strictly prohibited; yet in practice, these protections are routinely violated. Addressing child malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa therefore demands actionable, long-term strategies. The author argues that these should include integrated humanitarian and development interventions, community-based protection and resilience programmes, climate-smart nutrition initiatives, data-driven early warning systems, and harmonised, multi-sectoral policy planning.
About the Beyond Compliance Blog Symposium
The Beyond Compliance Symposium has been developed within the framework of our research programme on Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors. It brings together scholars and practitioners across the humanitarian, human rights, development and security sector fields to reflect on the conceptualisation of everyday negative lived experiences of armed conflict.
Understanding the personal, material, temporal and spatial scope of (civilian) harm and (humanitarian) need, as well as the characteristics and motivations of actors experiencing, causing, and exercising protective agency in relation to harm + need, represent crucial first steps in articulating effective responses. Contributions to the symposium also include reflections on legal and extra-legal strategies to prevent, reduce and redress harm + need, including through promotion of compliance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law and efforts aimed at generating restraint from violence and abuse.
Photo credit: © Nigeria. Borno State, Biu General Hospital, stabilization centre supported by the ICRC. While the COVID-19 pandemic has hogged all the attention, the rise in malnourished children has the medical staff of Biu General Hospital worried that more children may die if they don’t receive treatment.
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