UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency - United Kingdom

©UNHCR/N.James

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is initially aiming to support more than 350,000 of the most vulnerable among the flood-affected population in Pakistan where the worst floods in more than 80 years have devastated hundreds of communities.

Rain continues to fall across the region with the threat of monsoon flooding further south in Punjab Province and heavily-populated Sindh Province rising. With many hundreds of thousands of people displaced and without adequate shelter, food and water, government departments and aid agencies are in a race against time to reach affected communities while many roads and key bridges remain cut off.

Across Pakistan's  Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, some 10,000 UNHCR tents have so far been distributed along with other relief supplies such as plastic tarpaulins, blankets, jerry cans and kitchen sets as part of a coordinated response involving the UN and the government.

UNHCR will receive several thousand additional tents and Ramadan food parcels donated by the government of Saudi Arabia on Saturday at its Peshawar warehouse in flood-affected Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Saudi Arabia has agreed to contribute more than 25,000 tents and other urgently needed relief items to the agency's monsoon relief effort.

UNHCR's relief items are being distributed by carefully selected partner charities including the Community Motivation and Development Organisation (CMDO), Sarhad Rural Support Program (SRSP) and the Centre for Excellence in Rural Development (CERD) as well as central government and provincial partners.

Monsoon affected people have told UNHCR teams how they fled their homes as they were hit by walls of water. Tens of thousands of homes have been destroyed or badly damaged. Families have lost all their food stocks, livestock and personal possessions. One woman told UNHCR how her family had lost 50 cows. 

Some of those affected by the flooding are tenant farmers who fear that their landlords will rebuild their own homes first, leaving the devastated tenant farmers reliant on UNHCR's tents and plastic sheeting for the foreseeable future. Those families with homes still intact have found them filled with mud and their remaining personal belongings and food completely ruined.

In addition to tents and plastic tarpaulins, the UN Refugee Agency is distributing cooking sets, blankets, sleeping mats, jerrycans and buckets. Many displaced families have set up makeshift tented camps using donated aid supplies on the median strip along the Islamabad-Peshawar highway adjacent to the swirling Kabul River.

UNHCR's main mandate is protecting refugees, but the organisation has always positively responded to the call for humanitarian assistance for the local population of Khyber Pakthunkhwa and Balochistan. Living in Pakistan's monsoon-affected communities are some 1.5 million Afghan refugees who have taken shelter in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan over the past three decades and an estimated more than 700,000 people dispaced by fighting in the Swat Valley and other areas last year.