Westport, Conn. (22 June 2009)  In an effort to expand critical relief and health services to thousands of children and family members forced from their homes in northwestern Pakistan, Save the Children has launched a nutritional program for children under 5, whose health is increasingly at risk as their displacement lengthens.

The humanitarian agency also will provide health services and information to pregnant and lactating women.

The current humanitarian crisis is the result of a mass exodus of more than 2 million people from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) since early May. Over half of those fleeing the violence are children.

Save the Children will establish two stabilisation centres for severely malnourished children suffering medical complications in hospitals in Mardan and Swabi. The agency continues to deploy health teams, comprising male and female doctors as well as a lab technician and other health workers, to conduct mobile clinics in areas where large numbers of families have fled and provide medical supplies to overstretched government facilities. The teams will transport the most serious cases back to stabilisation centres for further assistance.

“Parents’ resources are dwindling, making it difficult for them to provide nutritious food to their children,” said Ned Olney, Save the Children’s vice president for global humanitarian response. “With the early years so critical for children’s cognitive and physical development and for future success, it is vital that we address hunger and malnutrition.”

To date, Save the Children has reached approximately 117,079 persons (including 70,247 children) with emergency healthcare, relief goods and child protection programming in Mardan and Swabi districts. The agency has begun monthly family food distributions for 28,000 families, numbering close to 196,000 people, about half of them children, and is providing baby kits to families with infants.

Save the Children, which has been working in Pakistan for three decades and is focused on assisting displaced families living in remote, scattered villages in the NWFP, where few other agencies are providing support.

With your support

Save the Children needs your support to help meet the most critical needs of children and families who are fleeing the violence in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

If you would like to donate to Save the Children please select your national organisation from the list below, or visit Save the Children US Website. Your donation will help provide drinking water, food distribution and other necessities.

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]