A UN humanitarian team arrived in Zimbabwe Saturday for a visit aimed at curbing a deadly cholera epidemic and food crisis and which will include a meeting with President Robert Mugabe, officials said.
"The mission arrived today (Saturday). It is led by Catherine Bragg, the UN assistant secretary general for humanitarian affairs and deputy emergency relief co-ordinator of OCHA," a spokesman of the team, John Nyaga, told AFP.
The other four members of the team are from the World Health Organisation (WHO), World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Children's Fund UNICEF, he said.
During the five-day visit, the UN officials will meet Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, among others, he said.
"The aim of the mission is to understand the reality of the situation in Zimbabwe," Nyaga said. The team will visit humanitarian projects in Zimbabwe, mostly in the capital Harare. On Sunday, it will hold informal meetings with UN officials, said Nyaga.
Mugabe agreed to allow the top-level UN team to visit Zimbabwe to find ways of curbing the cholera epidemic and food crisis, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.
"The humanitarian situation, which has reached an almost unbearable point for the people in Zimbabwe, has been a source of deep, deep concern for the international community, for the United Nations," Ban told a press conference in Addis Ababa on the sidelines of an African Union summit. "He (Mugabe) assured me that he and his country would be fully open to humanitarian work and activities." Cholera has killed more than 3,759 people in Zimbabwe, while seven million people - more than half the population of 12 million - need emergency food aid, according to UN figures.
The country has also been hit by economic meltdown, characterised by the world's highest inflation, officially at 231 million percent in July, though believed to be much higher. South African President Kgalema Motlanthe has convened the region's finance ministers next week to devise a plan to assist their starving and desperate neighbour.
Reconstructing Zimbabwe may cost as much as five billion US dollars (about four billion euros), Tsvangirai said after a meeting with Motlanthe on Friday in Cape Town.