4.5 million South Sudan children in desperate need of humanitarian aid

JUBA – The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Regional Director for Eastern and Southern Africa Regions, Mohamed Malick, has said nearly 4.5 million children in South Sudan are in desperate need of humanitarian aid.

Addressing reporters in Juba on Friday, Mohamed appealed for an urgent scale-up to respond to their needs.

“If you look at today estimation of the number of people across that are in need of humanitarian assistance or facing challenges linked to security or challenges brought up by the floods is around 8.3 million including 4.5 million children in need of humanitarian assistance,” Mohammed said during Friday’s press conference.

The visiting Regional Director said the appeal covers a variety of sectors, including water and sanitation, child protection, nutrition, health, and education.

“All areas which are related to child survival and when I say survival is the health, the nutrition water and sanitation and everything that is related to child protection and child development whether education or early childhood development and all these areas are where you see the dire need of children,” said a UN official.

He urged all partners to support UN Children’s Fund to scale-up response to affected children in the country.

“We need engage all sectors and everyone who has responsibility and action to be undertaken in favor of children and in our intervention, we need to prioritize them (children) bases on what we are targeting and I think priority today should go to those actions that can save children’s lives,” he said.

“Like actions that are related to health, actions that are related to prevention of malnutrition and treatment of malnutrition and actions that are related to prevention of diarrhea by using clean water because these are the leading cause of death,” he added.

During his visit to South Sudan on 4th November, Mohammed met with senior government officials including, Rebecca Nyandeng De Mabior, Vice President for Gender and Youth Cluster, Hussein Abdelbagi Akol, Vice President for Service Cluster, and Minister of General Education, Awut Deng Achuil.