‘Huge amount of humanitarian work still remains to be done in Pak’: UN official

NEW YORK - UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos, has said that humanitarian aid organizations have made significant headway in helping victims of the floods that recently devastated Pakistan, but insisted that there are still more challenges to be faced.

Amos’ comments come after she returned this week from a four-day visit to Pakistan.

It was her second trip to the country, since taking the UN’s top humanitarian post in September.

“Going back three months later I am pleased that we’ve been able to feed millions of people, that we’ve been able to provide shelter for millions of people, that millions of people have had access to water and sanitation and to urgently needed healthcare,” Xinhua news agency quoted Amos, as saying.

“But a huge amount still remains to be done,” she added.

During her latest visit, Amos visited Sindh Province, which she said was one of the areas most profoundly impacted by the flooding.

“Only about 50 percent of the waters have receded in that province. There are still small communities that we have not been able to get to because of the nature of the flooding, so the situation remains extremely difficult,” Amos said.

The floods, triggered by torrential monsoon downpours, had first struck the western province of Baluchistan on July 22 before inundating the worst-hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and then entering Punjab and Sindh.

It is estimated that the floods affected up to 20 million people, while over 750,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

The UN had rated it as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, saying that the number of people suffering from the crisis exceeded the combined total in three recent mega disasters - the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. (ANI)