The UN children’s fund UNICEF has appealed for 80 million U.S. dollars to scale up live-savings operation in the Horn of Africa to prevent 40,000 children deaths in the region.
In its latest update on the situation in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia where more than 8 million people are in dire need of food aid, over half of them children, the UN agency called for sustained aid to prevent massive child deaths in the region.
“There is a population of about 40,000 children under the age of five who are so acutely malnourished at this stage that they need sustained help,” said UNICEF Emergency Communication Officer Gordon Weiss in a release received here Saturday.
“Otherwise they face the very real prospect of death in the coming months,” Weiss said, adding that despite recent rains, a two-year drought has already killed half the livestock and the agency fears that the nomadic pastoralists and their children who roam the vast region could be next.
Rain is falling in East Africa, but too late to halt much of the devastation of six months of severe drought.
UNICEF, other UN agencies and partners in the region have already begun adapting programs to better suit the pastoralist way of life.
Source: Xinhua, May 14, 2006
