‘We’d have died of hunger’: the charity kitchens feeding millions in Pakistan

Parveen Saeed placates a crowd of women seeking food handouts for Ramadan from one of her kitchens in Karachi, Pakistan. Photograph: Zofeen Ebrahim

There is a crowd outside the Khana Ghar food kitchen. Men wait patiently on one side as a group of women push forward, clutching photocopies of identity cards. “Every second day of Ramadan we give one-month’s food rations because we close our kitchen,” says Parveen Saeed.

“But we can only give one bag to one family, and we need their ID cards to check that, says Saeed, 63. “There are more and more mouths to feed than we can cope with.”