Millions of children in Haiti continue to suffer without access to clean water, education and health care, a United Nations Children’s Fund report released Friday says.
A massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti last year, killing 220,000 people. The quake left hundreds of thousands injured or homeless – including 750,000 children.
Today, more than one million people – 380,000 of them children – still live in crowded camps, the UNICEF report revealed just days before the one-year anniversary of the country’s Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake.
"Children in particular suffered and continue to suffer enormously because of successive emergencies experienced in 2010, and they have yet to fully enjoy their right to survival, health, education and protection," said Francoise Gruloos-Ackermans, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti.
Canada is one of the Top 10 UNICEF donor countries for Haiti, raising $14 million in the last year, but the recovery process is just beginning, said Kim Moran, president and CEO of UNICEF Canada.
"Children are always the most vulnerable in emergencies because they don’t have the same access as adults would to change their circumstances," she said.
2010 was a volatile year for Haiti. A cholera outbreak followed the quake, claiming more than 2,500 lives and sickening hundreds of thousands more months later. Riots and violence followed a November election which stalled humanitarian response.
But UNICEF’s emergency response teams have made "big steps" in improving water and sanitation, education, child protection and nutrition, Moran said.
She said crews worked on "stabilizing" the plight of Haiti’s children in the past year, with a priority placed on creating tent schools, distributing supplies and training tens of thousands of teachers to counsel kids who have lost family members.
UNICEF reports that they’ve distributed 1,600 tents to set up more than 225 temporary learning spaces, and their efforts helped 600 schools to reopen in early April .
But more than half of the four million children in Haiti still do not attend school. Roughly 5,000 schools were damaged by the earthquake, causing the whole education system to shutdown. Further rebuilding has been hampered because of rubble clearance and land tenure issues.
Only 10 per cent of births are registered with the government in the impoverished Caribbean country, said Moran.
"Birth registration is critical and this amount is extremely little. In Canada, it’d be close to 100 per cent," she said. Sites were established for children separated from their families, but only 1,265 of the 4,948 children registered as being alone were reunited with their loved ones, said the report.
About 40 per cent of those registered said they were separated from their parents before the earthquake, Moran said.
Even before the earthquake, chronic malnutrition affected one in three Haitian children under the age of five, said the report.
"It’s not that they’re hungry but they weren’t getting the right nutrition out of their food. Rice is cheap in Haiti so kids will eat tremendous amounts of rice, but you need vitamins and minerals to make your brain grow properly," Moran said.
"Almost immediately" after the earthquake, the UN agency fed children fortified peanut-based paste used for famine relief and set up 107 tents that provided nutritional advice and counselling to mothers and children, said Moran.
More than 102,000 children and 48,900 mothers have been reached and malnutrition rates have since stabilized, according to the 31-page report.
The agency also worked with the World Health Organization to carry out emergency vaccination campaigns. Two million children were immunized against preventable diseases such as polio, diphtheria, and measles.
Only 19 per cent of Haitians had access to clean water and basic sanitation facilities before the earthquake, down from 29 per cent in 1990, the report said.
At the height of the emergency, UNICEF provided 8.3 million litres of safe water to 680,000 people each day in large trucks, Moran said. The country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is without a single storm drain or sewer, so UNICEF organizers are developing water systems and community-led sanitation plans.
"We’ve made significant progress, but now we’re in long term development and this will take time. It’s important to have this momentum continue," Moran said.
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