Helping migrant and displaced children thrive
]
Yamileth and her family were able to find help on their journey at a UNICEF-supported centre on the outskirts of Cúcuta. The centre provides hygiene kits for children, adolescents and their families, psychosocial support and promotes child protection, breastfeeding, sanitation and hygiene. But for many of the tens of millions other children and their families around the world who have been displaced – including nearly 33 million children that had been forcibly displaced by the end of 2020 – the outcomes aren’t so welcome. That’s particularly the case for those fleeing conflict affected areas.
According to the 2021 Lancet Series, for example, women of reproductive age living near severe conflict are three times more likely to lose their lives than women in peaceful settings, with infectious diseases, physical injury and poor sexual and reproductive health, among other factors, all playing a role. More generally, conflict can leave women and children facing malnutrition, infectious diseases, poor mental health, poor sexual and reproductive health, physical injury, and even death.
To survive and thrive, migrant and refugee children – like all children – require good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, security and safety and opportunities for early learning. Yet too often, humanitarian and refugee response plans are falling short in considering these basic needs, particularly around caregiving and early learning.
One of the challenges in ensuring that these needs are addressed is that much of the available evidence about young people’s journeys is incomplete. How many young people are leaving their homes? Why have they left? How will they get there? How long will they stay? What opportunities, challenges and deprivations will they face? To what extent will their sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as gender norms, influence these answers? While the available evidence leaves no doubt that gender must be considered when answering these questions, the data around their circumstances is often critically limited.
Still, while the information we have is often incomplete, there is much that we already know about what works, and what needs to be done to ensure displaced children and young people are on the right track to survive and thrive. Making that possible will require, among other things, a number of key actions from health and humanitarian donors, implementing agencies and other actors:
Making gender a central part of humanitarian and displacement responses – ensuring the gender-specific needs of children and young people on the move are considered from the outset of an emergency and at every stage in their journey. As part of this, we should be delivering gender transformative programmes, ensuring children and young people in emergencies and on the move can actively challenge gender norms and inequities to reach their full potential.
– ensuring the gender-specific needs of children and young people on the move are considered from the outset of an emergency and at every stage in their journey. As part of this, we should be delivering gender transformative programmes, ensuring children and young people in emergencies and on the move can actively challenge gender norms and inequities to reach their full potential. Closing the information gap by ensuring collected data captures the multitude of reasons children and young adults migrate and analysing how these reasons may differ by sex and age – including how experiences shift from early childhood through adolescence; investing in data systems to better measure the number of internally displaced children by sex and age; and supporting citizen-generated data to better understand gaps in service provisions for girls and boys on the move.
and analysing how these reasons may differ by sex and age – including how experiences shift from early childhood through adolescence; investing in data systems to better measure the number of internally displaced children by sex and age; and supporting citizen-generated data to better understand gaps in service provisions for girls and boys on the move. Assessing the needs of and increasing investments focussed on pregnant women and families with young children in every humanitarian and displacement situation, including developing a coordinated, holistic, and cross-sectoral plan of action to address these needs. This should include caregiver mental health, socio-emotional support, safety and security of the home environment, breastfeeding support, and economic support, especially during a child’s first 1,000 days.
of and pregnant women and families with young children in every humanitarian and displacement situation, including developing a coordinated, holistic, and cross-sectoral plan of action to address these needs. This should include caregiver mental health, socio-emotional support, safety and security of the home environment, breastfeeding support, and economic support, especially during a child’s first 1,000 days. Including critical maternal and newborn health actions in all phases of emergency response plans, as laid out in the Nurturing Care Framework.
Far more research is necessary to fully understand the journeys of migrants such as Yamileth and how gender-specific vulnerabilities, needs and opportunities shape the lives of girls and boys – and their families – on the move. But based on what we already know, it is essential that we focus on the earliest years of life to create a next generation where all children not only survive, but also thrive.
For more on this issue, read: Uncertain Pathways: How gender shapes the experiences of children on the move
Nada Elattar, Early Childhood Development (ECD) Specialist and Manager, UNICEF Uganda Country Office.
Joan Lombardi, ECD expert.
Katie Murphy, Senior Technical Advisory Early Childhood Development – International Rescue Committee (IRC) and acting Director of Education.
Sweta Shah, International ECD expert.
UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore’s remarks at the launch of UNICEF’s first child-focused climate risk index with Greta Thunberg and other youth activists - World
]
As delivered
NEW YORK, 18 August 2021 – Thank you to everyone for joining us today for the launch of this important report. And a special thank you and welcome to our amazing panel of young leaders fighting for a world they will one day inherit. But it is their world now.
Just this summer – all over the world – we are seeing evidence of just how imperiled this inheritance is. Wildfires so vast in Canada and the western United States the air quality rating all the way across the continent in New York is the worst it had been in a decade and a half. Historic flooding in Germany that devastated entire towns and killed hundreds. Landslides in India. Heatwaves in North Africa. The list goes on.
Critically, the devastating results of climate change are not discriminating across borders. They are disrupting lives and livelihoods regardless of income, race, or region. But it is by far the poorest and most vulnerable countries that are suffering the most.
There is an inherit injustice in this. Some of the countries least responsible for the climate crisis are the ones warming fastest, and facing the most severe impacts. Hundreds of thousands of people are being pushed toward starvation in Madagascar in the wake of back-to back droughts. Cyclones and storms continue to ravage Mozambique.
And we are also extending this injustice to the next generation – all of whom were born into a world fully aware of the consequences of inaction, yet unable to agree on measures to stop it.
But children are more than just victims of our inaction. Children are uniquely vulnerable to climate hazards.
Compared to adults, children require more food and water per unit of their body weight. They are less able to survive extreme weather events, and are more susceptible to toxic chemicals, temperature changes and disease.
Climate change affects their health. Their neighborhoods. The food they eat. The air they breathe. Every aspect of their futures. Every aspect of the rights to which they are universally entitled.
The young people who have joined us today can tell you that. They have experienced the impacts of climate change first-hand. They are inheriting a world increasingly unrecognizable. And they are pleading with us to do something about it.
The young people with us today, and millions of others around the world just like them, are demanding action. According to a recent U-Report poll we conducted online, 9 out of 10 of the 270,000 respondents in 21 countries believe it is their responsibility to tackle climate change. And all over the world, they are doing just that, they are doing what they can: Standing up for their futures. Inspiring and enlisting others in their cause. Leading by example, and showing that change is possible. Starting community projects, being volunteers, and dreaming of and fashioning solutions.
At UNICEF, it is our responsibility to make sure these voices and solutions are heard.
Young people deserve greater consideration from world leaders and a more meaningful seat at the table in the decisions that will define their future. Their calls should be listened to, and acted on.
That’s why UNICEF has been collaborating with Fridays For Future to amplify the voices of children and young people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and it is why today we are launching this report and the Children’s Climate Risk Index with them, on the third anniversary of the youth-led climate protest movements that have grown into a global movement.
If you have not yet had a chance to read the report, let me recommend it to you. It is the result of over a year of work by dedicated colleagues at UNICEF and our partners and represents a compilation of evidence that we have generated over the last five to six years. Its stark findings validate the message we have been hearing from young people: We are in a crisis of crises. A pollution crisis. A climate crisis. A child’s rights crisis.
According to the report, almost every child on earth is exposed to at least one climate and environmental hazard, shock or stress. Almost every single young life will have to cope with heatwaves, cyclones, air pollution, flooding or water scarcity.
A startling 850 million – approximately one-third of all children – are exposed to four or more of these stresses, creating incredibly challenging environments for children to live, play and thrive.
Globally, about 1 billion children – nearly half of the world’s children – live in countries that are at an ‘extremely high-risk’ from the impacts of climate change.
These children face a deadly combination of exposure to multiple shocks with high vulnerability resulting from a lack of essential services.
The survival of these children is at imminent threat from the impacts of climate change.
Until now, no climate index has focused solely on child climate risk in a global context. This groundbreaking report provides the first comprehensive view of children’s exposure and vulnerability, because understanding where and how children are uniquely vulnerable to this crisis is crucial in responding to it.
By improving children’s access to essential services, such as water and sanitation, health, and education, we can significantly increase their ability to survive these climate hazards.
But addressing the climate crisis requires every part of society to act.
So, in closing, UNICEF urges governments and businesses to listen to children and prioritise actions that protect them from impacts, while accelerating work to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Governments must also ensure environmental policies are child-sensitive. Schools need to be educating for green skills in both the first and second decade in children’s life.
And children and young people need to be recognized and listened to as the rightful heirs of this planet we share. Theirs is the most important perspective in this crisis.
It’s time we listen to them.
Media contacts
Tess Ingram
UNICEF New York
Tel: +1 347 593 2593
Email: tingram@unicef.org
Sara Alhattab
UNICEF New York
Tel: +1 917 957 6536
Email: salhattab@unicef.org
Haiti earthquake: over half a million children at risk of waterborne diseases - UNICEF
]
PORT-AU-PRINCE / PANAMA CITY, 2 September 2021.- About 540,000 children in the southwest of earthquake-stricken Haiti are now facing the possible re-emergence of waterborne diseases, UNICEF warned today.
Severe conditions in southwestern Haiti - where over half a million children lack access to shelter, drinking water and hygiene facilities - are rapidly increasing the threat of acute respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, cholera and malaria.
“The lives of thousands of earthquake-affected children and families are now at risk, just because they don’t have access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene,” said Bruno Maes, UNICEF Representative in Haiti. “Cholera has not been reported in Haiti since February 2019, yet without urgent and firmer action the re-emergence of cholera and other waterborne diseases is a real threat that is increasing by the day.”
Prior to the earthquake, only over half of the healthcare facilities in the three departments most affected by the earthquake had basic access to water services. In the aftermath of the earthquake, nearly 60 per cent of people in the three most affected departments do not have access to safe water. Thousands of people whose houses have collapsed lack access to sanitation due in part to the damage wrought by the earthquake.
With the National Directorate for Water and Sanitation (DINEPA) and civil society partners, UNICEF is to improve access to water, sanitation and hygiene for affected families:
About 73,600 people receive access to safe water through water trucking systems, six water treatment plants and twenty-two bladders
Over 35,200 people benefitted from the distribution of about 7,000 hygiene kits, including household water treatments products, soap, water storage, handwashing devices and hygiene pads.
A week after the earthquake devastated Haiti, UNICEF shipped more than 65,000 water purification tablets, 41 bladders, three water treatment units and family hygiene kits. UNICEF has already ordered 31,200 additional hygiene kits. UNICEF, the only UN agency to deliver safe drinking water to the affected population, aims to reach 500,000 people with WASH support.
“Our efforts to deliver more safe drinking water don’t match the dire needs in all the affected areas,” said Maes. “Impatience and sometimes frustration are mounting in some Haitian communities, and this is understandable. But obstructing relief operations won’t help. In the past few days, several distributions of essential hygiene items had to be temporarily put on hold as tensions arose on the ground. Together with financial constraints, insecurity is currently slowing down our lifesaving activities on the ground.”
UNICEF is calling on local authorities to ensure safe conditions for humanitarian organizations to operate and scale up relief assistance to earthquake-affected communities. The 14 August earthquake which struck Haiti has further exacerbated an already challenging humanitarian situation shaped by persistent political instability, socioeconomic crisis and rising food insecurity and malnutrition, gang-related violence and internal displacement, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the Haitian-Dominican migration influx.
In addition to the US$48.8 million appeal made for 2021, UNICEF is now requesting a humanitarian appeal for children (HAC), of US$73.3 million to scale up its interventions in response to the earthquake and internally displaced persons. So far, less than 1 per cent of this required funding has been received.
UNICEF is calling on the international community to urgently provide additional funding for the humanitarian response and prevent the emergence of waterborne diseases in Haiti after the earthquake.