MAs this year, with governments drastically reducing their support for humanitarian organizations, it is essential to draw everyone’s attention to theWinter emergency that millions of refugees around the world are facing. Resources are urgently needed to repair bombed houses, insulate homes, provide heat and blankets to children and the elderly, guarantee medicines and hot food. Actress Cate Blanchett joins the UNHCR appeal: the aim is to raise funds to immediately provide life-saving aid.
Cate Blanchett’s appeal for UNHCR: «Let’s help refugees get through the winter»
«A safe roof, heating, blankets, warm clothes, food and medicine: thousands of families will have to face freezing temperatures without what is taken for granted for many of us» explains Laura Iucci, director of fundraising for UNHCR Italy. «The drastic reduction in funding in fact it forces us to limit winter support.”
The situation is particularly serious in some countries around the world.
From Syria to Ukraine, UNHCR’s Winter 2025 Emergency campaign
Like in Syria, where over 1 million Syrians have returned to find their homes destroyed after years of war. 750,000 people across the region risk facing the winter without a roof or even blankets, mattresses, kitchen kits, solar lamps and winter clothes.
In Ukraine, in the fourth winter of the war, temperatures have begun to plummet, and could drop to -20°C. In Afghanistan, the frost has already arrived. Nine out of ten Afghans live in poverty and this year more than 2.2 million people have returned from Pakistan and Iran in desperate conditions, often without having ever lived in Afghanistan before. Two recent devastating earthquakes have made families even more vulnerable.
Where will the funds raised go and how to donate
The funds raised will finance UNHCR’s winter plan, already operational in the field in seven countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Ukraine and Moldova. Interventions include: repair of bombed houses and isolation of homes and community centres; distribution of blankets, warm clothes, solar lamps and stoves; direct financial assistance to purchase food, medicine and winter clothing.
To donate and support the campaign: https://sostieniunhcr.it/ winter-cs
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