UNICEF, WFP, WHO and FAO and their partners, including HANDS, Merlin and Muslim Hands, are seeking $11.67 million to scale up nutrition and other support to over 1.3 million people for a year in Tharparkar and surrounding districts.
The United Nations (UN) says that more funds are urgently required to scale up support for nutrition interventions, including sustainable development solutions to tackle the nutrition crisis in the drought-affected Tharparkar.
The UN and its partners have been providing nutritional support in Sindh since 2010, assisting 1.7 million children and 800,000 pregnant and lactating women through malnutrition management, nutrient supplementation, and health and nutrition counseling.
The UN’s scaling up plan would help establish 44 community- based malnutrition treatment sites, provide emergency health services, build and rehabilitate water harvesting structures, establish health and nutrition surveillance systems and provide livelihood support, concentrated animal feed and vaccination of small ruminants.
Those intervention would complement the support so far provided by government authorities from all over Pakistan that in the last six months distributed more than 15,000 tons of food items, including wheat, rice and food packs to families in need and vaccinated 2.2 million livestock.
“The 2011 National Nutrition Survey says that 44 percent of children under five in Pakistan are stunted, 32 percent underweight and 15 percent suffer from acute malnutrition. Considering the situation in Tharparkar as exclusive to drought conditions is not accurate,” said Timo Pakkala, UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Pakistan, while highlighting the main causes of the recent surge in morbidity and mortality rates of children and adults in Tharparkar and surrounding districts.
He added that reports in early March 2014 highlighted a rising number of malnutrition-related, clinical admissions and child mortality in Thar district.