A new refugee camp with 2,500 temporary homes is being built in Nigeria's north-eastern city of Maiduguri for a few of of the hundreds of thousands of refugees there who fled the Boko Haram uprising.
The camp - another sign that few expect the conflict to end soon - will house refugees occupying public schools, allowing classes to resume, hopefully next month, officials said.
Hundreds of thousands of children have not been to school for more than 18 months in Maiduguri and elsewhere in north-east Nigeria, where authorities closed all schools as they were targeted by the Islamic insurgents.
No-one knows how many refugees there are because most live with friends, family and strangers who have taken pity on them. Public grounds and the compounds of mosques and churches also provide refuge.
Some Nigerian officials have said there are about 200,000 refugees in Maiduguri, but Doctors Without Borders put the number at one million in August with hundreds arriving each week.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article