 The Niger crisis is happening in a region called Differ Region, which is in the eastern part of Niger. But it is happening beside the border which runs between Cameroon, Chad and Northeastern Nigeria, around Lake Chad. And it involves Boko Haram, who have been in terrorism against various governments in the area, and the military forces of these areas. So this crisis is causing a huge number of refugees, possibly between four to seven million, we're not sure, plus IDPs, which are internally displaced people, plus returnees. These people are being moved very rapidly, either by the military or by Boko Haram offensives, or they are running away from atrocities. And that means that it is very difficult to see patterns emerging about where they're going to come and where they're going to end up. And these people have nothing, and they're leaving with nothing and they're arriving with nothing in places where there is not enough water, there's not enough sanitation, and there's not enough for them in terms of livelihood. The problem is that aid agencies like Oxfam, even the UN, are finding it difficult to get down to these areas to respond. One of the main issues is lack of humanitarian space, and that means that we cannot get access to areas. So for instance, in Difa, where this crisis is happening in Niger, we cannot get access to an area around Boso. That is because Boko Haram attacked Boso a couple of months ago, and it is still a no-go area for us. We cannot get access to areas beside the border between Niger and Nigeria, because the military from Niger have declared that a no-go area again, and they basically pushed out all the people who lived in that area. The other issue is that there is not enough funding. Funding is a serious problem, although the British government and the US government have recently said they don't understand why aid agencies are complaining about not enough funding. The truth is that it is either being targeted at the wrong place, or that this is funding that they have already promised and that has already been earmarked. But in terms of fresh funding, everybody is finding it difficult to get their hands on money. And the third problem, I think, is the spontaneous nature of this. People are coming not into camps where traditionally or normally you would expect to be able to provide a high level of service. But here, mainly people are going into what they call spontaneous settlements. And spontaneous settlements are basically just a village with maybe two or three hundred people, and now suddenly it has five thousand people. And these people have nothing. They have no water, no sanitation. They're obviously creating a huge new level of problems. And that means that agencies are also having to supply services in these areas, but it is very mobile. So people are moving all the time. So it means that your type of service that you're supplying has to be able to reflect the mobile nature. So it needs to be very transitionary, not permanent at all. Policy lessons in the Lake Chad Basin Crisis. Number one, it is a regional wide problem and so it needs a regional wide response. And that response needs to be political. It needs to be humanitarian. It needs to be regional and it needs to involve the governments of the individual countries leading on this. And that means that the resources also need to be targeted at these four areas from a policy point of view. Second point is policy. It is about protection. There are huge protection issues. The rights and crisis of the people involved, the people affected by this crisis, are being abused wholesale. So policy needs to also be targeted at the governments and the regionally to make sure that governments are stepping up to the plate in terms of restoring the rights of people because some of the protection issues are from the military of these countries. Thirdly, there is policy issues around funding and the type of funding and the level of funding. And fourthly, there is a policy issue of humanitarian space. In Nigeria, they blocked off areas, but now that is getting slightly better so aid agencies are able to move into these. So for instance, MSF have gone into an area in Nigeria where there was suspected there was going to be some issues about food security. In fact, they found there was famine with almost 70,000 people. I think the one thing that people can do now is to try and look at how to reduce this conflict, not increase it. And that means that from a policy point of view, the governments, the international community have to come together and start working towards some solution because as long as there is a conflict going on, we are going to have a massive humanitarian crisis going on in this area.