Zimbabwean children suffer severe food insecure: Report

ANKARA

Zimbabwean children can "eat only once a day" while having to walk for hours to collect drinking water over current worsening food crisis, a humanitarian agency warned in a report Wednesday.

"This is an extremely complex situation evolving in Zimbabwe, where families that had four or five ways of making a living, can no longer rely on any of them," William Lynch, Country Director of the Save the Children agency in Zimbabwe, was quoted as saying in the report.

"The preliminary results of our assessments have been grim; we've seen spikes in unattended births and a decline in vaccinations as the health system falters," he added.

Poor rains have forced Zimbabwean children to "travel longer distances" and exposed them to violence and abuse risks, the report said.

The agency, which has been working in Zimbabwe since 1983, warned that unless the humanitarian response in Zimbabwe was significantly expanded, "lives will be lost as children and their families adopt more extreme coping mechanisms to survive."

Roughly half of at least 7.7 million Zimbabweans across the country suffering from severe food insecurity, are children, the report said.

This year, the UN World Food Program (WFP) estimated that around 5.5 million Zimbabweans in both rural and urban areas would require food aid amid a debilitating drought that has hit the nation over climate change.