Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDPs) camps.

The youngsters, some of them only infants, are being treated in a feeding centre run by Doctors Without Borders in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, according to a report by The Mail of London.

Up to one in four of the youngsters in the 110-bed centre are dying, Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Shaista Aziz was quoted by the newspaper in a report published yesterday.

Most of the children were brought from the IDPs camps, she added.

Parents living in the camps complain that there is not enough food, and when it does arrive, it is insubstantial.

Dr Natalie Roberts, deputy emergency desk manager for the medical aid group, said the feeding programme in Maiduguri “has quadrupled in size in the last weeks, but each time it expands it becomes rapidly full’.

In one camp, Muna Garage, 20 children under the age of five died in a single week.

At Farm Centre Camp, on Maiduguri’s outskirts, residents said they had received no food in more than one month.

They and displaced persons at other camps said that when they do get meals, it consists only of rice and beans. They get one shovelful a day – literally delivered from a shovel – whether a household has six people or 12, they said.