Children First Newsletter: Volume 12
There is an urgent need to scale up community-based platforms such as the mother-led Care Groups, to prevent malnutrition and child deaths and continue building communities’ resilience to cope with these climatic events.
Highlights
As the weeks pass, the need for funding becomes more urgent. In this Newsletter, I am reiterating my call to donors to be generous in funding UNICEF’s El Nino appeal.
As Zimbabwe struggles through the devastation of the current El Nino induced drought, many children are at risk of malnutrition. And it is urgent to scale up community-based platforms such as the mother-led Care Groups, to prevent malnutrition and child deaths and continue building communities’ resilience to cope with these climatic events. Through Care Groups, mothers are taught the best foods for young children to prevent malnutrition, how to monitor the nutritional status of their own children and when to go to the clinic when medical help is needed. In addition, UNICEF is supporting the Ministry of Health and Child Care to conduct timely screening to assess how many children need urgent treatment for wasting – the most life-threatening form of malnutrition – reaching them with vital services and improvements.
