The desperate family of a one-year-old Zimbabwean boy with a debilitating facial deformity are pleading for help to save his life.

Prosper Mathe was a happy, healthy baby but soon his parents noticed his lower lip and tongue was growing rapidly.

Doctors diagnosed him with haemangioma, a benign, non-cancerous tumour of the endothelial cells, but the poor family have no money to pay for an operation.

Prosper's tongue is so large that it threatens to suffocate him, which forced doctors to cut off the tip.

However they were unwilling to operate on his lower lip unless the family paid.

His mother, Moditor Shoko, has no job and his father, Gilfred Mathe, works in a supermaket and they cannot scrape together the funds to pay for the surgery.

His father said that after failing to find doctors that could help them in Zimbabwe, they moved to South Africa but had been unable to come up with the cash needed for the treatment.

He said the hospital in the township of Tembisa in Gauteng Province, in north-east South Africa, where they are currently staying, wanted £1,300 to carry out the operation.