Hundreds of children starving in Niger

Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding centre. But aid groups despair that so many other children are dying because the world was slow to respond.

"I thought we would not make it safely," Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking several hours with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding centre at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey.

She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba's face.

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought.