The European Commission said today it would spend 13 million euros on providing clean drinking water, improving hospitals and other aid in Iraq.
Some of the money, to be spent over the next year, will go to orphanages and schools and to vaccinating 3.5 million children against polio.
The Commission will finance nine projects in central and southern Iraq, which will be run by aid groups and United Nations' agencies.
The Commission said the humanitarian package was one of the biggest it had ever approved for Iraq. It was given 50 percent more funding than last year's humanitarian aid package.
Iraq said on Tuesday nearly 9,000 people, mostly children, had died in a single month this year because of diseases it blames on a decade of sanctions which the UN imposed on Iraq after its 1991 invasion of Kuwait.
The EU is the biggest aid donor to Iraq and has, since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, donated 273 million euros for humanitarian operations in the country.