Save the Children has now been given the green light to get back to delivering life-saving aid to children in Zimbabwe, after being unable to operate fully for five months. The aid agency’s 120-strong team is now heading back to its operational areas and will be starting work in communities next week.

Rachel Pounds, Save the Children’s country director in Zimbabwe, said: “We are hugely relieved to be able to get back to working directly with children and their families in Zimbabwe. For five months we have been stuck in our offices, unable to reach thousands of children who have been struggling to survive in extremely difficult conditions.

“Our teams are already returning to the field and will be back out among communities on Monday. It’s impossible to know how bad the situation has got until we’re on the ground, although our local partners have confirmed our fears of increased rates of malnutrition among children.

“We also know that thousands of children have had to drop out of school in order to try and find food for their families. We fear some girls will have been forced into prostitution, and that others will have been pushed into early marriage with their families unable to look after them.”

Zimbabwe already has the highest number of orphans per capita in the world, with one in ten children dying before their fifth birthday. Estimates now say that up to 5.1 million people may be in need of food aid by early next year.  Chronic shortages of food and other basic commodities have worsened due to the political and economic turmoil in Zimbabwe, with many provinces now facing a food deficit of several months.

Pounds continued: “This aid vacuum has been disastrous for children, who are always the most vulnerable in an emergency. Over the next few weeks our teams will be working flat out to respond to the urgent needs of families, including assessing numbers in need of food aid, getting the poorest children back to school, and helping families prepare for the next planting season.”

However the children’s charity is now facing huge challenges due to the country’s rocketing inflation and the increases in food and fuel prices.

Pounds said: “Hyper-inflation, together with soaring food and fuel costs, have made Zimbabwe an incredibly difficult working environment for aid agencies. We have to get all our supplies and materials from outside the country, and getting what we need is hugely expensive.

“However Save the Children has been working in Zimbabwe for nearly 25 years through a number of crises, and whatever the situation, our one aim is to get help to the millions of children who need it. This is an aim we can, once again, achieve.”

Save the Children works in the Zambezi Valley, the poorest and driest area of Zimbabwe, as well in five urban areas. Our work includes distributing food, looking after orphans and children caring for sick relatives, supporting families to grow their own crops and earn a living, getting children into school, providing clean water, and providing health care and nutrition education to parents and carers.

Media contact 

For more interviews with Rachel Pounds in Zimbabwe or Zimbabwe experts in London, please contact the media unit on +44 207 012 6841 or +44 7831 650 409 (out of hours)