Haiti six months after the quake

Haiti six months after the quake: Progress made but challenges remain

Wellington, 13 July 2010. – Six months after the strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years, significant progress has been made in helping survivors, but the challenge of meeting the needs of more than 800,000 affected children and their families remain daunting.

The earthquake left behind a death toll of over 220,000 persons and over 300,000 injured in an already fragile nation. Some 2m people have been displaced from their homes and some 1.6m of them remain in overcrowded displacement camps. The country’s infrastructure, never strong, was devastated with 60 per cent of government infrastructure destroyed and over 180,000 homes uninhabitable.

The earthquake in Haiti was a disaster for children and it isn't over yet, but UNICEF and its partners are working hard every day to save lives and help children claim their future.

Today, safe water is being provided to some 1.2 million people through our partnership with other aid organizations. UNICEF is directly providing water to 330,000. More than 275,000 children have been immunized against major vaccine preventable diseases.

Nutrition programmes are providing food to some 550,000 people with special needs – children under five and lactating women – and some 2000 children with severe acute malnutrition are now receiving life-saving therapeutic feeding and care.

The education sector was hard hit by this disaster, with 3,978 schools damaged or destroyed – 80 per cent of all schools in the earthquake zone. This has compounded an already fragile situation where less than half of school-aged children were attending school before the earthquake.

Half a million children have received basic education materials, 185,000 children benefiting from UNICEF’s own programmes. And special training has been provided to some 2,300 teachers and 3,000 education personnel.

UNICEF has been supporting the Government to get all Haiti’s children into school. Temporary schools have been slowly restoring structure and stability to the lives of earthquake affected children and also providing a locus for other health and protection initiatives. The focus now is to expand access to learning opportunities for all children, particularly the hardest to reach, across the nation.

Accelerating site clearance, identifying solutions for relocation of displaced families occupying school grounds and speeding up school construction to ensure space is available before the next school year are both challenges and priorities for UNICEF and its partners. UNICEF is also working with the Government to alleviate the burden of school fees in a context where 90 per cent of schools are fee-based and not public.

Read a UNICEF report that details progress made for children in Haiti over the past six months: http://www.unicef.org.nz/article/1481/HaitiSixMonthsOn.html

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