For over a month, more than 900,000 people from Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency have been displaced due to a government-launched military operation. UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, estimates that 74 per cent of these internally displaced people are women and children. At least 36,000 are pregnant.

UNFPA and its NGO partner, the Network for Human and Social Development, are supporting the Government’s National Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Network in efforts to ensure that pregnant women are able to safely deliver and care for their babies, and that women of reproductive age have access to sanitary napkins during menstruation.

Most of the displaced are in the Bannu District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the vast majority living in cramped surroundings with host families or in public buildings, amid stifling heat.

The Government and humanitarian agencies are providing food, essential medical supplies, drinking water and shelter items, but the response urgently needs to be scaled up. Health facilities are overwhelmed by demand; a lack of female medical staff to provide care for displaced women is a critical challenge. UNFPA has taken part in rapid assessments of health and protection needs, and has begun to distribute hundreds of clean delivery kits, newborn baby kits and dignity kits with personal hygiene items.

Kiran Azeem Khan, a pregnant mother of five children, fled her home in Miran Shah without money or supplies. Last week she gave birth at the UNFPA-supported Zanana Women and Children Teaching Hospital in Bannu city.