Nine years into a crisis that shows no sign of abating, 11 million people in the Lake Chad basin are in need of urgent help, a high-level conference has heard.

More than two million people have been displaced and five million regularly do not have access to enough food in Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, where the armed group Boko Haram has waged a nine-year insurgency. The insecurity means people who are used to supporting themselves have no access to the land they farm or waters they fish in, making them dependent on outside help.



Last year’s conference on the crisis in Oslo raised $672m (£521m) and on Monday the UN’s humanitarian chief, speaking on the first day of the Berlin summit, said he expected that figure to double this year. The EU promised €138m (£124m) of new funding.



There were calls for Nigeria and the other three countries affected by the Lake Chad crisis to increase their financial commitment. The Nigeria humanitarian fund only has international donors. The country’s budget minister last year pledged first $2m and later $3m to the humanitarian response, but there are no monitoring mechanisms in place to check how much has actually been spent.



Needs are not being met partly because not enough money has been given, but also for reasons that are often political.



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“Last year’s conference helped avert a famine in the region. This year’s conference must not only continue this lifesaving operation, but must make protection of vulnerable children, women and men a top priority. Conflict-affected families depend on the international community to put the lives of civilians over and beyond competing political agendas, such as their war on terror,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s secretary general, Jan Egeland.



In north-east Nigeria, the eye of the crisis, the military is trying to defeat Boko Haram, fulfilling a promise made by President Muhammadu Buhari before he took office. With the next presidential election approaching in February, it has stepped up operations in Borno state.

According to organisations working on the ground, the military restricts the amount of food going into rural areas not under its control, and concentrates aid in garrison towns dotted around Borno state, in an attempt to empty the countryside of civilians. The humanitarian community is then expected to deliver services in the garrison towns, in effect supporting the military strategy and narrative that there are only Boko Haram members and sympathisers left in the countryside.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aisa Kache, 35, and her son Shetene at a camp in Bama, Borno state, in August. Photograph: Reuters

More than 800,000 people are currently in areas beyond the reach of humanitarian aid, but thousands of these are being pushed out of their villages by military operations, and arrive in camps that are often so overcrowded many have to sleep out in the open.



These new arrivals give the only indication of how those still stuck in inaccessible areas are faring, and more than a quarter of all the children who have arrived in the past six weeks have had severe acute malnutrition.



Meanwhile, people who fled Boko Haram and ended up in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, are being returned to the towns they came from or close to their villages of origin, which usually do not have the services to cope with a large influx of people. Some parts of north-east Nigeria are relatively secure and ready for reconstruction and development, while others are still facing a deep human crisis.



In recent weeks Nigeria’s vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo, has halted the return of displaced people to unsafe areas. After hearing about the returns and the levels of malnutrition, he summoned the governor of Borno state and its minister of reconstruction, rehabilitation and resettlement to Abuja for an explanation.



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It is unclear why the vice-president has only just become aware of a situation that has been going on for at least five months. The Guardian recently found that people were being persuaded to return to the town of Bama with promises that their houses had been rebuilt and that Boko Haram militants had been pushed out of the area. But many found that the “rebuilding” consisted merely of plastering front walls to create the illusion of reconstruction. Instead of the peaceful town they had expected to find, Bama had a trench around its perimeter guarded by soldiers – and still bombers managed to get in and kill seven people shortly after they arrived.



Another focus of the conference is protection. With an Isis-affiliated armed group at the centre of the conflict – one Boko Haram faction is called Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) – the armies fighting its militants are often seen as good because they are fighting the evil of Boko Haram.

But in Nigeria and Cameroon members of the military have been responsible for widespread abuses.

In May Amnesty International found that Nigerian soldiers raped starving women while claiming that they were rescuing them. Last year it said hundreds of people suspected of supporting Boko Haram were being tortured on military bases and other sites in Cameroon. Between 10,000 and 50,000 Nigerian men are missing, many of them thought to be victims of arbitrary arrest, detention and killing by the authorities.

