The Federal Government has expressed concern over the alarming psychological impact of conflict on Nigerian children, with studies showing that 41.5 per cent of children exposed to the Boko Haram insurgency in Chibok met the clinical threshold for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while a separate national study recorded PTSD in 79.7 per cent, depression in 84.8 per cent and functional impairment in 90.7 per cent of displaced Nigerian children.
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Dr Bernard Doro, reeled out the statistics at the National Policy Dialogue on the Psychosocial Impact of Conflicts on Children in Nigeria, held in Borno State, where he pledged stronger Federal Government intervention in children’s mental health.
This was contained in a statement issued by Dr Abimbola Fasanu, Senior Technical Adviser on Information Systems and Data Analysis to the Minister, on Tuesday night in Abuja.
Dr Doro said the scale of psychological distress among children exposed to conflict demanded deliberate and coordinated action, stressing that humanitarian interventions must extend beyond meeting immediate physical needs to addressing the psychological wounds inflicted by violence.
“Our Ministry treats psychosocial wellbeing as central to humanitarian response, not a side issue, connected, through our Humanitarian-Development-Peace approach, to protection, education, nutrition and household stability,” he said.
“A child who has been fed but not healed in mind has not truly been rescued,” the Minister added, stressing the need to make mental health support an integral part of humanitarian assistance.
According to the Minister, the statistics represented a documented and measurable pattern of trauma rather than isolated cases, with children in conflict-affected communities experiencing anxiety, anger and persistent hyper-vigilance.
“This is a documented, measurable pattern, not an isolated tragedy,” he said, adding that a continent-wide analysis had placed PTSD among conflict-exposed African children at approximately 36 per cent.
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He explained that the present administration developed the One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System (OHOPRS) to strengthen coordination among humanitarian response, social protection and poverty reduction systems, ensuring that vulnerable children are identified and connected to appropriate services.
“This is why we are building One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System (OHOPRS), so a distressed child identified in a Maiduguri school is not lost in a system that does not talk to itself,” he said.
Dr Doro announced four key areas of commitment, including strengthening community referral pathways in collaboration with the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Health and the health sector; improving the identification of trauma exposure alongside economic vulnerability through OHOPRS and the National Social Registry; and training frontline humanitarian workers and teachers to recognise and respond appropriately to children experiencing psychological distress.
“A child spends more hours with a teacher than a therapist,” Doro said, stressing the strategic role of schools and teachers in identifying children requiring mental health support.
He further pledged that the Ministry would work with relevant institutions to drive a coordinated national response and implement policy outcomes arising from the dialogue, while urging stakeholders to regard investment in children’s psychological recovery as an investment in Nigeria’s long-term stability, education, health and security.
“Untreated trauma in a generation of children is a cost that returns to our schools, our clinics and our security for decades. Every naira spent healing a child’s mind today is one we will not spend containing that wound twenty years from now,” he said.
“Behind forty-one per cent, seventy-nine per cent, ninety per cent, is a specific child with a name, waiting to see if we mean what we say. Let this dialogue mark the point where we stopped naming this burden and started, deliberately, to lift it,” the Minister stated.
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