What are we doing to help?
Save the Children is on the ground in Yemen delivering food, medicine and humanitarian support wherever possible. We’re supporting health centres and hospitals across the country, which have treated more than 100,000 children suffering from malnutrition. We’re operating mobile health clinics in the hardest-to-reach areas and we’re helping children come to terms with their experiences by providing psychosocial support.
We urgently need your support to reach more children and families and to help protect their lives from the threat of hunger, disease and the devastating impacts of a brutal war.
A broader overview
Since March 2015, the situation in Yemen has deteriorated into a living nightmare where children starve to death daily and are shelled and bombed in their homes and schools.
Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already the poorest country in the Arab world – 850,000 children under five were already chronically malnourished before the current crisis.
Yemen is now the largest humanitarian emergency in the world, an astonishing 75% of the population are in need of aid. A massive humanitarian effort has only just prevented famine being declared, but extreme hunger is a reality for many families.
16 million people also lack access to clean water and sanitation creating a dangerous breeding ground for infectious diseases. Last year Yemen was rocked by the worst cholera outbreak in recent history, with over a million suspected cases. With less than half of the country’s health facilities fully functioning and the entire health system on its knees, people struggle to get the healthcare they so desperately need.
An unfathomable 3.3 million people have been uprooted from their homes, including 1.6 million children. Hospitals, water networks, schools and other services vital to everyday life have been bombed or have shut down because staff are no longer being paid.
An estimated 4.5 million children were unable to go back to school at the start of the last school year, depriving them of their right to an education and putting their futures in jeopardy.
How will your support help?
With your support, we can:
- Continue to treat the many thousands of children suffering from malnutrition. In severe cases we treat them in our stabilisation centre or they are treated at home with highly nutritious peanut paste. Since the start of the response, 143,448 children under five have been treated for malnutrition.
- Set up more Child Friendly Spaces which offer children safe areas where they can learn, play, and begin the long journey to recovery. More than 128,000 children have already been registered to our Child Friendly Spaces across the country.
- Continue to support health facilities and health and nutrition teams which provide families with essential primary healthcare. We can also continue to train healthcare providers and volunteers in the prevention and management of malnutrition as well as the provision of nutrition education
- Distributing food to children and pregnant women to help to ensure that these most vulnerable groups don’t slip into malnutrition. It’s an essential preventative activity, which will help make sure the situation doesn’t continue to deteriorate.
- Set up Temporary Learning Spaces to make sure that children don’t miss out on an education. We’re supporting existing schools, training teachers, and providing essential equipment. We will also continue to support education programs in refugee camps to ensure that displaced children don’t fall too far behind.