Your support in the most difficult places to be a child

In response to flooding in the area, UNICEF-supported community health workers went around the village to assess and weigh children under 5 years old, and bring nutrition services to children affected by severe acute malnutrition. A community health worker told Mahdi’s parents that their child was severely malnourished and needed urgent care.

Thankfully, you helped UNICEF provide life-saving care for Mahdi, including healthcare and therapeutic milk, before it was too late.

We know how to protect millions of children like Mahdi from severe malnutrition and death. We need to scale up these solutions to protect every last child.

Thanks to your support, UNICEF uses innovative geomapping technology to reach these children with life-saving vaccines. By tracking settlements, water points and markets, we can predict where the nomadic communities are going to be. We then bring them services like immunization, malnutrition screening and birth certificate registration.

Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to help children grow up healthy and reach their full potential. And yet, due to pandemic-related disruptions, conflict, displacement and misinformation, 25 million children are now missing out on vaccines every year. This puts them at risk for diseases like polio, measles and pertussis

Despite this, 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 does not officially exist.

In Cameroon, every child has the right to a free birth certificate within 90 days of birth. But once that deadline has passed, the cost of obtaining a birth certificate is more than many parents can afford. Parents in remote or marginalized communities often miss the 90-day deadline, which means their children go unregistered.

UNICEF is addressing this challenge by supporting workers and volunteers who go into communities, identify new births and establish birth declarations, so each infant will receive an official birth certificate and all the protections that come with it.

Radhika was admitted to a UNICEF-supported hospital, where she received life-saving healthcare. While she was in hospital, her parents learned about the importance of skin-to-skin contact, how to express breast milk and how to recognize hunger cues.

Radhika’s weight increased and she was able to go home with her parents, who had newfound knowledge about how to protect their daughter from malnutrition.