Pregnant women, children to get special food sachets in flood-hit areas

ISLAMABAD: The federal government will provide special food sachets for pregnant women and children in flood-hit areas through Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) to fulfill their nutritional needs, ARY NEWS reported.

According to sources privy to the matter, the food sachets will be handed over to pregnant women and children in a phase-wise manner. “In the first phase, 400,000 women and children will be handed over the sachets through BISP,” they said.

The sources in National Health Ministry said that a sachet will comprise of food items fulfilling nutritional needs of the pregnant women and children. “The nutritional deficiency among them will be determined through measurement of height and weight and other factors,” they said.

They further shared that 30 percent of the food sachets will go to Sindh and 25 percent to Balochistan while 15 percent will be given to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Punjab provinces and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Islamabad and Gilgit Baltistan (GB) regions.

It is pertinent to mention here that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has recently shared that the children are among the most affected from the floods in Pakistan with at least 400 of them being dead during the climate-induced calamity.

Taking to Twitter, Shehbaz Sharif said that the children make up one third of overall death toll in the recent floods. “Now they are at even greater risk of water-borne diseases,” he said.

The prime minister sought help from UNICEF and other global lenders to deal with risks associated top children in the floods.