The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mr Mark Lowcock, has said that in spite of improvements in the humanitarian situation the crisis in the Lake Chad region is not over.

He said that millions of people continue to remain dependent on life-saving assistance.

The top UN relief chief at the Berlin Conference on the Lake Chad Basin region on Monday, urged greater international support for the region to safeguard the progress achieved.

“There is still a big humanitarian crisis. It is not over despite the progress we have made,” Lowcock told a high-level humanitarian conference on the region.

In February, the meeting at a UN-backed conference in Oslo, Norway, donors pledged over $650 million towards emergency assistance programmes in 2017 and beyond.

According to him, these resources helped achieve a significant scale-up in the humanitarian response, reaching more than six million people with assistance, and averting a famine in Northeast Nigeria.

However, he said that humanitarian needs had continued to grow and so do the resources needed to respond.

Of the $1.58 billion required for 2018, only about $600 million or 38 per cent had been received as of July 25, he said.

“The appeal we had on the humanitarian response plan this year has been generously financed but not to the degree where any of us can be comfortable that we can meet the needs of the people we can reach, still less of those we are still trying to reach,” Lowcock said.