Only 50% of adults in Pakistan can read and write; far fewer women than men. Every year at least 15,000 women die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth and one in ten children dies before their fifth birthday.
Many girls in the flood-affected areas of Sindh have never known a true childhood; they have all had to grow up very quickly. The only way to protect their future will be to make good quality care and education available to them.
Abandoned shells of poultry farms stretch on both sides of the road next to deserted wheat fields while roofs of larger buildings have collapsed in what appears to be the aftermath of a war.
“It was like the world had come to an end,” a man later told me, recounting the terrifying moment two months ago when unprecedented torrential monsoon rains flooded this whole region, uprooting more than five million people from their homes.
“We were terrified. It didn’t stop raining and when the water reached our knees we decided to flee,” she recounted. “We spent days under the rain; children were crying of hunger everywhere. We didn’t know what to do.”
Global efforts to improve the health and wellbeing in the developing world are paying off. However, one area where insufficient progress is being made is family planning. There are 215 million women around the world who would like to delay or avoid pregnancy but do not have access to modern family planning methods.
Driving through Sindh Province of southern Pakistan, I’m struck by the vast stretches of once thriving farmland now barren. Figures released last week indicate that nearly one in four children is acutely malnourished, and therefore at much higher risk of severe illness and death.
Six months since the floods struck Pakistan, Save the Children’s relief work has reached the most remote and distant corners of the affected areas of the country. From the cold, mountainous hamlets of northern Swat to the devastated plains of Dadu in Sindh, our teams are working diligently to assist people across the length and breadth of the world’s sixth most populous country. More than 2.6 million men, women and children have benefitted since August 2010 from our work.
Six months on from the Pakistan floods, as we develop our recovery strategy, I am constantly asking myself what we can do to improve the lives of children in Pakistan in the future. However, after spending two weeks in the field I feel that it’s hard, even impossible, especially for the flood-affected communities in Pakistan, to think about or focus on the future when there are still so many basic immediate needs that have yet to be met.
Categorized as the biggest disaster in the country’s history, the Pakistan floods of 2010 will dissipate, but their effects will be long-lasting. Millions of people were made homeless. Some still are. Those who have returned home find only mayhem and ruin.
It’s been almost two months since the floods hit Pakistan. It’s difficult to see how life can possibly return to normal for the millions of people who have been affected. As children languish on roadsides, railroad tracks, relief camps and overcrowded hospital wards, their fight against hunger and disease goes on and on.
It is estimated that during Liberia’s 14-year civil war between 1980-1994,
50% – 70% of women and girls were sexually assaulted. These are astounding statistics. Assessments on gender-based violence led by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and the WHO in 2005 and 2006 revealed the most common form of violence against women was rape; it accounted for 74% of the various forms of gender-based-violence carried out during the civil conflict.
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