Flood-hit communities living in extreme poverty are not being given the time to recover from the last year’s devastating floods as the danger of more floods loom, World Vision Pakistanhead Alexander Davey said on Tuesday.
One year after the worst floods hit Pakistan, international aid agency, World Vision, called for relief efforts to be ramped up for at least another year to get the affected families back to their pre-flood level of living. World Vision is one of the world’s leading relief, development and advocacy organisation, dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice in almost hundred countries worldwide, a press release said. In Pakistan, World Vision is committed to longer-term rehabilitation of affected communities and is helping families restore their pre-floods livelihoods by running early recovery and development projects, distributing seeds and agricultural tools, and offering training and cash for work programmes, the statement added.
Last year’s floods, which affected more than 20 million people and wiped out an area the size of the UK, were the fourth major emergency to hit Pakistan.
“Even children have been asking the World Vision aid workers if the floods will hit this year as well,” Devey said, adding that children were faced with heightened vulnerability to diseases and were suffering from malnutrition. He said the floods had washed the crops away, destroyed 5.4 million acres of land and with the rise in food prices, malnutrition had gone up by 25 percent in the worst-hit areas such as Sindh. He said World Vision is responding to Sindh’s high malnutrition rates through community-based nutrition sessions and has set up more than 20 mobile clinics, often the only form of healthcare on offer.
In the past year, the aid agency had reached an estimated 1.5 million people with food distributions, clean drinking water, hygiene kits, blankets, shelter and by establishing women and infant-friendly spaces across three of Pakistan’s four provinces, he said.
Government and NGOs need to do more for the flood affectees who are still living in miserable conditions and in some places without adequate food and shelter
Spot on , as this is the need of the hour and we all must not close our eyes on the flood affectees who lost their belongings in a blink of an eye, which took them their lives to build on…..
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