Food relief for starving communities in Zimbabwe

Mother and son collecting their food allocation in Chiredzi, Zimbabwe

17 December 2007: Plan is stepping up emergency food relief for the starving children and families of Chiredzi district in Zimbabwe.

Chilonga community in Chiredzi, about 560km south east of Harare, is facing severe food deficit with 130,000 people in need of urgent food relief.

Plan is implementing the World Food Programme’s (WFP) vulnerable group feeding (VGF) scheme amid appeals from village headmen to increase the monthly ration and extend the scheme up to May 2008.

Starvation prevalent

According to village headmen, the entire Chiredzi rural community is food insecure and symptoms of starvation and hunger are prevalent.

“For this season, signs of another severe drought are already widespread as evinced by the number of livestock that have died so far due to insufficient grazing land.  Human loses may not be recorded per-se but nutritional deficiencies amongst children are emerging,” said headman Bob Madzimure.

The majority of families in Chilongo community are headed by women. Most of the men immigrated to South Africa to work illegally and rarely come back.

“Seeing off our children to school knowing fully well that they did not eat anything is the most painful experience. We wish the school supplementary feeding scheme could be resuscitated to sustain our children’s health thereby keeping them in school,” said Nyarai Chifamba, a mother of 5, whose husband left for South Africa in 2003 and hasn’t come back.

“While we appreciate the food relief, the ration hardly lasts a month even though we are now eating once a day. Our appeal is for the maize ration to be increased to 15kg per family member,” she added.

Survival hopes

These sentiments are shared by the entire community whose hopes of survival are rooted in the VGF scheme.

Under the WFP’s scheme, food relief is provided to the most food-insecure households to safeguard the nutritional status of vulnerable groups and mitigating further depletion of assets due to hunger.

More than 2,000,000 people in Zimbabwe will require food assistance by March 2008, according to WFP projections.

Learn about Plan's global food security work.