By Zeeshan Suhail

JACOBABAD DISTRICT, Pakistan, 24 October 2012 – Reshma is a cheerful first-grader with hopes and aspirations for her future. She makes beautiful dolls in her spare time.

Last month, monsoon rains flooded her village, Chandran, in Jacobabad district, Sindh. Now her immediate hope is to have her destroyed home reconstructed.

©UNICEF Pakistan/2012/Zaidi
Ten-year-old Reshma walks in front of her destroyed house in Jacobabad district, Sindh. Nearly 460,000 houses have been swept away or badly damaged by flooding. Children are disproportionately affected in the aftermath of such emergencies.

Reshma’s father is a labourer with nine other children to feed, clothe and educate. Work is scarce, and the family had barely recovered from the back-to-back monsoon floods of 2010 and 2011.

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(c) Photo courtesy of Games for Change
Young girls playing a mobile game developed by Games for Change, Delhi, India.

‘Beyond School Books’ – a podcast series on education in emergencies

by Rudina Vojvoda

NEW YORK, USA, 1 June 2012 – Since their invention in the late 1940s, electronic games have been an integral part of our culture. But recently, games have been doing a lot more than just entertaining: They promote health, education and human rights, and bring about social change, among other things.

© UNICEF/NYHQ2011-1345/Antony Njuguna
Kenya, 2011 - On 17 August, a boy drinks a high-nutrition porridge at Catholic Integrated School in the drought-affected district of Wajir, in North Eastern Province. Hundreds of children are receiving porridge at the school, part of a national policy to continue school lunches during the summer vacation to ensure children are fed.

Press release

NAIROBI, Kenya, 20 October 2011 – The massive international response to the child survival crisis in the Horn of Africa has already shown some positive results, but much more needs to be done to save hundreds of thousands of children at risk of dying from malnutrition and disease, UNICEF said today according to a progress report three months after famine was declared in parts of Somalia.

By Rob McBride

WAJIR, Kenya, 26 September – 2011 – In a futile attempt to save the last of the goats, Ali Yusef Omar, 16, and one of his younger sisters had no other option but to feed the ravenous animals handfuls of shredded-up cardboard boxes they had scavenged from the local town. Kept in a make-shift pen made of thorn bushes, only three remain out of a herd that had once numbered two hundred.

“Of course these goats are going to die,” said the boy with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. “You think they’re going to survive on boxes?”

© UNICEF Afghanistan/2010

By Taleen Vartan

NEW YORK, 10 August 2011 – Continuing into its fifth year, the Back on Track Programme on Education in Emergencies and Post-Crisis Transition (EEPCT) – a partnership between the Government of the Netherlands, the European Commission and UNICEF – supports countries in emergency and post-crisis transition contexts to establish sustainable progress towards quality basic education for all.

By Priyanka Pruthi

NIMBA COUNTY, Liberia, 24 June 2011 – Forty-year old Philippe Cheugui used to teach history and geography at a school in Danane, a town in western Côte d’Ivoire. He was a successful teacher and public spokesperson, an inspiration to many.

Today, he finds himself seeking refuge under a tarpaulin shelter in Liberia’s Bahn camp. He watches his wife cook beside the tent with despair and relief in his eyes. He knows they are fortunate to have survived.