Feeding children in emergencies — Hassan Taifour’s story

"The most important part of our work is to prevent children and adults from dying. When a disaster takes place — when there is an earthquake or a drought or war, when there is displacement, refugees, when food security deteriorates and malnutrition rates increase, especially among children under five — that's the time when we are needed. We go to communities and we work with them. We do our best to treat malnourished children, and to prevent those who have not yet become malnourished from becoming malnourished.

A typical day

"A working day in the field starts at 6 o'clock in the morning and it finishes at 6 or 7pm. If there is travelling time, you need to travel at 4 to arrive at the distribution site at 6. Sometimes, if you have many beneficiaries, you are still working when it gets dark. Sometimes we end up working with the headlights of a vehicle or with torches to make sure that everybody has got their ration. The priority is to give food. We have to do paperwork and work on computers and reports and things like that at night or weekends.

Niger emergency

"In Niger, we started from scratch — Save the Children didn't have a programme there before July 2005. We worked in two districts, Maradi and Zinder. In Zinder we had something like 12 distribution sites, with an average of 1,000–1,500 children at each distribution site. We gave thousands of children a chance of survival. If we hadn't set up these feeding programmes then these children would have become malnourished and most of them would have died. We saved lots of lives, especially children.

What we do

"Our activities include feeding children, and pregnant and lactating women, and giving family rations. We do health education. We also do community mobilisation. If you involve the community in a feeding programme from the very beginning — you discuss exit strategies with them, and what problems they face and how these problems are going to be resolved — then they have the feeling that this programme is their property. We employ people from the community, especially women and community mobilisers, who go from house to house, to explain about the programme and to do measurements. So these are our activities — feeding programmes, education and mobilisation.

"Since I started there have been many changes in the way we work. The most recent approach is community therapeutic care where children are treated at home for severe and moderate malnutrition. Many people from the community get involved and the community feels it is their programme."