By CECILIA OLOGUNAGBA

The UN has expressed worry that displaced communities in Nigeria – with camps closing and nowhere else to go – risk returning to areas where lethal explosive remnants may be hidden from view.

Speaking on the sidelines of a key international meeting in support of landmine action taking place at UN Geneva on Wednesday, experts in the field explained how shrinking resources in Afghanistan and Nigeria had exposed civilians to unexploded ordnance.

They stressed that mine action programmes, often viewed as long-term recovery initiatives, are in fact emergency humanitarian interventions that save lives.

Mr Edwin Faigmane, the Chief of the Mine Action Programme (MAS), representing UNMAS in Nigeria, in a statement said returnees in the country were at great risk of landmine deaths.

Faigmane said that a full 80 per cent of all civilian casualties had occurred in 11 of the 15 areas of return.

In response, UNMAS has trained Nigerian security forces, police and civil defence workers on risk education in unstable and “hard-to-reach” areas.

The tactic has paid off, Faigmane said, “as we have begun receiving reports back from the police or from community members saying that they found an item and that they’ve reported it to the village authorities or village leaders, who then reported on to the security and the military forces”.

Similarly, the meeting discussed the danger landmine explosive poised to children in Afghanistan.

According to the UN-partnered Landmine Monitor report, a staggering 77 per cent of all casualties in Afghanistan in 2024 were children.

Some 54 people are killed there every month by the explosive remnants of war, giving the country the third highest explosive ordnance casualty rate in the world.

“It tends to be kids, mostly boys in the hills tending sheep and goats and they are picking up things of interest and playing with them or throwing stones at them and killing or injuring themselves,” Nick Pond, who heads mine action work at the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), said.

Despite the urgent need for more deminers to make Afghanistan safe after decades of conflict, a lack of funding has meant that the UN-led team has “dropped and dropped”, Pond told journalists.

“In 2011 there were 15,000 people working in demining, and now we’ve got about 1,300.”

Total recorded child casualties in Afghanistan since 1999 number 30,154 children, “so the work in Afghanistan is key to decreasing the [global] number of casualties”, Christelle Loupforest, UNMAS Representative in Geneva, said.

She noted that although mine clearance work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Sudan has recently received better support, the situation in Afghanistan and Nigeria remains dire, with programmes facing imminent suspension without new donor commitments.

“It’s the same for our programme in Ethiopia,” she said. (NAN)