Homeless and hungry: actor Orlando Bloom speaks out about South Sudan hardship

Aid agencies must get food to close to three million people by July to avert a famine in Africa's Lake Chad region caused by drought, chronic poverty and Islamist insurgents Boko Haram, the UN said this weekend as it launched a funding appeal.

According to the UN, close to 11million people in northeastern Nigeria and around Lake Chad - roughly two in every three people - need humanitarian aid. More than seven million people risk starvation.

After visiting some of the children uprooted by years of conflict, Orlando Bloom, star of the Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings movies, said it was hard to grasp the scale of the suffering in the region.

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An insurgency by the Boko Haram Islamist militant group has displaced 2.3million people across the swamplands of Lake Chad, where the borders of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria meet, and disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of others.

Bloom, who is a goodwill ambassador for the UN children's agency Unicef, travelled to Diffa, southeast Niger, to meet some of the 1.3million children uprooted by what the UN says is one of the fastest-growing displacement crises in Africa.

"As a father, it is hard for me to imagine how many of these children are caught up in this conflict," the 40-year-old British actor said.

"During my trip I have heard dreadful stories about children fleeing on foot, leaving everything behind, including the safety of their homes and classrooms.

"It is extremely hard to comprehend this situation when you are not there. I saw the depth of the pain and suffering these kids are going through. This is not something any child should experience."

Up to a million people have been cut off from humanitarian aid by Boko Haram militants despite a regional military offensive against them.

On Friday international donors at a conference in Oslo pledged $672-million (about R8.7-billion) for the Lake Chad region for the next three years in new money, $457-million of which was for 2017.

The UN says it needs $1.5-billion in humanitarian aid for the region this year.

The presence of Boko Haram militants has prevented farmers from planting crops or accessing Lake Chad to provide water for their animals.

Fishermen have also been prevented from accessing the lake shared between Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad, aid experts say.

Boko Haram militants have killed around 15,000 people and forced more than two million from their homes during a seven-year insurgency.

They have been pushed out of vast swathes of territory they controlled in 2014, but their attacks and the counter-operations by Nigerian authorities still disrupt vital economic activity.

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The most urgent need is to provide 2.8million people with rice or sorghum, or cash to buy supplies, by July, the UN World Food Programme said.

"We are in the lean season and people's supplies are depleted. We need to avoid a famine," said Abdou Dieng, the WFP's country director for West and Central Africa.

Overall 10.7million people - roughly two out of three inhabitants - need humanitarian help such as food, water, education or protection, the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

The US, a major aid donor to the region in previous years, did not pledge any money at the Oslo aid conference. Stephen O'Brien, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator, said this was because the US administration was still in transition after November's election.

Half a million children aged under five are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. "One in five could die and the others could suffer severe long-term consequences, such as stunting," said Manuel Fontaine, Unicef's head of emergency programmes.

• Nigeria has declared Boko Haram near defeat - saying it has clawed back most of the territory it had lost in the northeast - but the government still faces suicide bombings, attacks and famine as it launches a drive to attract foreign aid to help rebuild the country's shattered northeast.

The government this month brought diplomats and donor organisation officials to Borno state, where the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009, to highlight a call for $1.5-billion for food, medicine, homes and schools in 2017.