COVID-19, conflict and climate change are creating a ‘perfect storm’. Families like Canab’s are struggling to cope as they have no time to recover before the next crisis hits.
This festive season please support our appeal to help save children like Salma* and Sayid* from the growing hunger crisis.
Your gift today can have double the impact. When you donate, your donation will be matched, helping it to go even further, and reach more children affected by the hunger crisis.
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Give Young Children Growing Up In Slum Brothels A Chance For A Better Future.
Bangladesh’s largest slum brothel - just one of many in the region - is the size of a small city and houses over 1,500 women and 1,000 children.
These women and children live largely out of sight from mainstream society - facing exclusion from education, life-saving healthcare, and their communities. Needing to provide for their children, mothers who were likely sold or trafficked into the brothel to start with, find themselves unable to leave and forced to work to pay off debts.
Children live with their mothers in rooms smaller than most one-car garages. When their mothers bring their customers home, they hide under beds while their mothers are working or they are pushed into the alleyway to play. Customers will use them to run errands, like fetching alcohol or drugs, and in some cases, they are tasked with cleaning up after customers have left. Some will be groomed to be the future of the business like their mothers and grandmothers.
How Can I Make A Life-Changing Difference?
How Can I Make A Life-Changing Difference?
No child deserves to feel the pain of hunger. It will take a huge outpouring from kind, decent Kiwis like you to respond to this crisis. But your kindness does save children’s lives.
Your generous gift could help our frontline teams keep children like Canab’s alive. Your gift could:
HUNGER CRISIS:
APPEAL
I WILL HELP SAVE CHILDREN
Pressure from people like you is critical - and it works. Save the Children works with children, families, communities and government ministries in Afghanistan to work toward real change for the lives of children suffering and at-risk.
What Is The Impact?
There is no vaccine for hunger. But there is a solution if you act now.
Children like Salma and Sayid deserve the best start in life. By donating to our urgent appeal today you can help them have that.
Afsana’s Story:
Growing Up In Bangladesh’s Largest Brothel
10-year-old Afsana* lives in Bangladesh’s largest brothel.
She’s tired because her mother Tuli*, a sex worker, entertains clients in the next room while she and her six-year-old brother try to sleep. Drunken men and women roam the dirty alleyways all night looking for drugs and alcohol, which are readily available in the brothel’s lanes.
But just a few hundred metres down the train tracks is another world – the primary school where Afsana gets to be a child again.
Save the Children and a local partner organisation founded the school for children from the brothel in 1997. At that time, local schools wouldn’t accept the children of sex workers, meaning girls like Afsana were left uneducated and vulnerable to following their mothers into sex work.
She’s frightened for her young twins, Salma and Sayid. When Canab spoke to Save the Children in Somalia, she was despairing. Her babies are sick and malnourished but she can’t get the nutritious food they urgently need.
Will you please give today? You’ll help us reach our target of $220,000 for life-saving nutrition, water and food programmes.
So many children are going hungry, and we urgently need your help to reach them. Don’t forget, a special fund will match your donation so you could make your gift work twice as hard for children today.
*Names changed to protect identities, but these are real people in Somalia affected by the hunger crisis.
We need to ensure that there are educational programmes and healthcare support available to help every last child find their way out - and give them an opportunity for a better future for themselves and their families.
This is why we need your signature to help us in our efforts as we work towards providing them with:
Access to education
Access to healthcare and counselling
Assistance with re-integrating them into their community
With your support and alongside our partners, you can protect children and save girls in Bangladesh from a future in sex slavery.
Take action today and pledge to give children from a chance to an education and a life free from sex slavery.
Click the button below to sign the petition today!
Every day Afsana goes to school, works hard and dreams of the day she and her mother can leave the brothel. Afsana is the second-best student in grade three and hopes to be a doctor when she grows up. “I want to be a doctor so that I can help my family if anything happens to them,” she says. But that dream will never become a reality without an education and the school Afsana attends is the place where children can get one.
Join the movement and take a stand for children in slum brothels by giving them a new chance at life through education and break the cycle of poverty.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
SOME DAYS CANAB ONLY HAS RICE TO FEED HER CHILDREN
"My children did not have dinner last night, nor did they have breakfast this morning" - Canab*, Somalia
Sayid at a malnutrition check-up people like you support. Photo credit: Sacha Myers / Save the Children
Majed* is moving out the danger zone of malnutrition after treatment. Photo credit: Save the Children
YES, I WILL GIVE TODAY
With your continued support, medics can reach children like Salma in rural areas. Photo credit: Sacha Myers / Save the Children
I WILL SUPPORT WITH A GIFT
give cash grants so families can buy essential food and medicine.
provide life-saving health and nutrition services for children, including screening for malnutrition and providing those at risk with therapeutic food.
set up water trucking and feeding programmes at schools to encourage children to stay in school.