IKEA Foundation Helps Improve 130,000 Children’s Lives in Somalia

UNICEF is planning to scale up their work to save children’s lives in Somalia, IKEA Foundation will enable UNICEF to provide treatment to 130,000 malnourished children.
In the last few months the situation in the Horn of Africa has escalated and on July 20th 2011 famine was officially declared by the UN in two regions in southern Somalia. IKEA Foundation believe that the situation in Somalia warrants urgent and critical attention. The first step is to save as many lives as possible, in the shortest possible time, because every minute counts. It is widely acknowledged that the most immediate need is to provide therapeutic and supplementary foods to those children who are on the verge of death. In order to start to meet the needs of these children and their families, UNICEF is planning to more than double their capacity. IKEA Foundations donation to UNICEF will enable UNICEF to provide treatment to 130,000 children to improve their chances of survival.

We recommend IKEA retailers not to promise to donate money or products for the famine victims in the Horn of Africa to any organization as this is managed by IKEA Foundation on a global level. Retail countries are responsible for taking care of emergency support in their countries and local communities. We however encourage you to locally support our partner organizations by directing co-worker’s and customer’s attention to UNICEF’s efforts to raise funds for the people in the Horn of Africa, if you consider this a good way of support, or just providing links from our website to their appeal for donations.

When it comes to emergency relief, the IKEA Foundation’s support is based on our partners’ needs assessment and focuses solely on developing countries. We support where we, together with our partners, see a short term need or provide support in the later re-building phase.

The IKEA Foundation aims to improve the opportunities for children and youth by funding holistic, long-term programmes that can create substantial, lasting change, and enable them to take charge of their own future. We work with strong strategic partners applying innovative approaches to achieve large-scale results in four fundamental areas of a child’s life. Currently funded programmes benefit an estimated 100 million children.

Learn more at www.ikeafoundation.org