Médecins Sans Frontières says hundreds of thousands of children in Nigeria required treatment for acute malnutrition in 2025, warning that emergency care alone will not resolve a crisis being driven by insecurity, rising food costs, disrupted livelihoods and weak access to essential health services.
Speaking as MSF marked 30 years of medical work in Nigeria, its Country Representative, Dr Abdulkadir Armiye, said the organisation treated 425,634 children for acute malnutrition in 2025.
MSF presented the figure as an indication of the scale of the malnutrition emergency.
MSF’s own published Nigeria activity data uses a different programme measure: it records 357,100 admissions to outpatient feeding programmes and 89,800 admissions to inpatient feeding programmes in 2025.
Those admission figures should not automatically be treated as a count of unique children because the published data does not establish whether every admission represents a different patient.
Treatment numbers expose a wider problem
Armiye said the challenge went beyond providing therapeutic care to children who were already acutely malnourished.
Children weakened by malnutrition are more vulnerable to disease, while conflict and displacement can cut families off from food, healthcare and other essential services.
MSF has linked the continuing crisis in northern Nigeria to food insecurity, inflation, inadequate health infrastructure, insecurity, disease outbreaks and shortages in humanitarian funding.
Earlier in 2025, the organisation reported that between January and May it had admitted 24,784 severely malnourished children to inpatient therapeutic feeding centres and 107,461 to outpatient centres across northern Nigeria.
MSF said those admissions were higher than in the same period of 2024.
Government, UN call for stronger response
At the anniversary event, United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Elsie Attafuah said the number of children treated reflected communities struggling with insecurity, rising costs, disrupted livelihoods and limited access to essential services.
She called for stronger coordination between government, humanitarian organisations and development partners, alongside investment in health systems, peace, security and local capacity.
Federal government representatives at the event also commended MSF’s work and said humanitarian interventions should strengthen Nigerian institutions and complement national priorities.
One government representative cited a separate figure of more than 444,000 children treated for malnutrition in 2025, including more than 353,000 through outpatient programmes and more than 90,000 in stabilisation centres.
That figure differs from the 425,634 total attributed to MSF’s country representative and from the programme-admission figures currently published on MSF’s Nigeria page.
IDNN is keeping those numbers separate because the available sources do not establish that they use the same methodology or measure the same population.
Prevention remains the accountability test
MSF says it currently supports nutrition and other health programmes across several Nigerian states and has repeatedly argued that treating children after they become severely malnourished is not enough.
The deeper test is whether governments and humanitarian partners can reduce the conditions that keep producing new cases.
That means improving reliable access to food, strengthening primary healthcare, protecting humanitarian access, addressing insecurity that disrupts farming and movement, and ensuring nutrition programmes have enough resources to operate before emergency wards are overwhelmed.
For families, the consequence is immediate.
A malnutrition crisis is not only a hospital statistic. It can mean a child becoming more vulnerable to infection, a caregiver leaving other children behind to remain at a treatment centre, and households already struggling with food costs losing more time and income seeking care.
The unresolved accountability question is whether the response will continue to be measured mainly by how many children are treated, or by whether fewer children need emergency nutrition care in the first place.