One in two Haitian children will need humanitarian aid by 2023, UNICEF warns

The serious humanitarian situation that Haiti is going through, immersed in a crisis of violence and political instability, led the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to establish an alarming prognosis about the needs and deficiencies they suffer children on the Caribbean island.

An estimated 2.6 million Haitian children, or one in two children, will need “immediate assistance to save their lives” by 2023, he said in a report Garry Conille, UNICEF regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, who concluded a visit to Haiti last week.

Conille said that in Cité Soleil, a neighborhood in the capital, there are about 8,000 children under the age of 5 at risk of dying from “acute malnutrition or cholera,” and asked for support to offer them access to drinking water.

UNICEF provided support to the Haitian authorities in 2022, Conille said, but now they need a greater effort for basic services such as sanitation and hygiene, education, health, nutrition, child protection and social protection.

UNICEF reported an increase of half a million in the number of Haitian infants in need of urgent help.

“This is one of the most difficult times to be a child in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, and it gets worse by the day,” Conille said.

“The upsurge in armed violence, cholera, combined with food insecurity and dizzying inflation have restricted access to essential health, nutrition, water and hygiene services and education for millions of children and their families,” he said.

The UNICEF executive called on the different strata of Haitian society and the international community to cooperate with this urgent need.

The aid group International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid NGO based in New York, predicted that the crisis in Haiti could worsen further.

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