UNICEF urges world to scale up aid assistance in Horn of Africa
Laaska News July 17,2011
NAIROBI, July 17 (Xinhua) — The UN children’s fund UNICEF on Sunday appealed to the international community to scale up its humanitarian responses in the Horn of Africa nation, warning the situation in the region is worsening for millions of children.
UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said the Horn of Africa region is facing a serious humanitarian crisis and urged the world to address the dire needs of more than two million children, of whom half a million are at imminent risk of dying. “There is a very serious crisis in the Horn of Africa and this crisis will likely to deepen in the next six months,” Lakes told a news conference after visiting the drought-hit communities in Kenya.
He said with no improvement in the overall food security conditions expected before early 2012 the already severe nutrition situation will likely worsen further. “What we are seeing here is almost a perfect storm, conflict in Somalia, rising fuel and food prices, and drought and the loss of the rain. Now we are going to go another four to five months before there will be a harvest and we all have a huge job ahead,” said Lake at the end of a four-day mission to Kenya. “In many of the poorest communities people are either too poor or too weak to be able to try to walk for help.”
He said more than half a million children in Somalia are acutely malnourished and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Southern Somalia is the most affected area with 80 per cent of all malnourished children living there.
The delivered consignment of relief items included five tons of essential nutrition supplies, including therapeutic food and medicines to treat severely malnourished children, and equipment to supply clean water to a camp for displaced persons in Baidoa.
Lake pledged UNICEF’s continued support, stressing that the international children’s agency would continue working closely with partners to scale up an emergency response in the region, which has been underfunded for many years.
He called on the international community and private donors alike to step up funding for UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR and other partners, and to focus new effort on finding solutions that address the deep- seated poverty and vulnerability in the region.
Xinhua.
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