In Port-au-Prince on Jan. 27, 2025, UNICEF Global Spokesperson James Elder interacts with students during a visit to a school that UNICEF and partners relocated from La Saline in 2023, after students got caught up in a clash between two armed groups.

Dispatch From Haiti: What Children Need Most

Multiple threats to children's health, safety and well-being include recruitment into armed groups amid escalating violence and displacement. A look at what UNICEF is doing to deliver urgently needed support, protection and hope.

Right now, the lives of the most vulnerable children hang in the balance as conflicts and crises jeopardize the care and protection that they deserve. Dependable, uninterrupted and effective foreign aid is critical to the well-being of millions of children. Please write your members of Congress and urge them to support ongoing U.S. investments in foreign assistance.

Child recruitment by armed groups on the rise

Children are being recruited into armed groups in Haiti in ever increasing numbers, UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder reported as he concluded a three-day visit to the country on Jan. 29. “Child recruitment into armed groups is rampant,” Elder said. "Children get recruited. It’s out of desperation. It’s out of manipulation, out of being engulfed in violence."

UNICEF estimates that up to 50 percent of armed group members are under age 18. Under international law, conscription of children is a violation of their human rights, whether they are coerced or not. Children are often forced by adult commanders to commit crimes and their juridical prosecution often fails to recognize the extent of their victimization.

Gianluca Flamigni, a UNICEF Chief of Child Survival and Development for UNICEF Haiti, spoke with 13-year-old Dieussica, who has been living at an overcrowded displacement site in Port-au-Prince for the last year.
Gianluca Flamigni, UNICEF Chief of Child Survival and Development for UNICEF Haiti, speaks with 13-year-old Dieussica at the Jean Marie Cesar displacement site in Port-au-Prince, where she's been living for the last year. "Most importantly, [children] need education," Dieussica said. "Too many young people are carrying weapons." © UNICEF/UNI727977

While in Haiti, Elder visited a prison where dozens of children were being held. "I sat with a 16-year-old girl," Elder shared. "Before she was here she was learning Spanish. Caught up in a raid. She wants to be a pediatrician. She's sixteen... The point of this is that childhood should not be a gift. Childhood is a right.”

Fighting among armed groups escalated in Haiti over the last several months; it has now reached unprecedented levels. One in eight, or over half a million children in the island nation have been displaced by the escalating violence, a 48 percent increase since September 2024.

Children get recruited. It’s out of desperation. It’s out of manipulation, out of being engulfed in violence. — James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson

Displaced children and adolescents in Haiti face heightened risks of violence, including sexual violence, exploitation and abuse, which has also surged 1,000 percent in the past year, UNICEF reported.

Children's access to essential services, such as education, clean water, sanitation and health care, is severely disrupted – exacerbating malnutrition and increasing exposure to disease and violence. Nearly 6,000 people are living in famine-like conditions. Unsanitary conditions in displacement sites further increase their vulnerability to diseases such as cholera which, with almost 88,000 suspected cases, continues to affect children.

UNICEF estimates that approximately 3 million children are in need of humanitarian assistance in the country, with over 1.2 million children under threat in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince alone. More than 85 percent of the capital city is controlled by armed groups.

Dr. Florence S. Saint-Surin, head of the Pediatric Department at La Paix Hospital in Port-au-Prince, the city’s last functioning public hospital, examines a young patient.
Dr. Florence S. Saint-Surin is head of the Pediatric Department at La Paix Hospital in Port-au-Prince, the city’s last functioning public hospital. © UNICEF/UNI729277

Doctors keep going at Port-au-Prince's only functioning public hospital

Almost half of the nation’s hospitals are not operating, and every hospital in the country is reporting difficulties in acquiring and maintaining essential medical supplies.

Elder spoke with Dr. Florence S. Saint-Surin, head of the Pediatric Department at La Paix Hospital in Port-au-Prince, the city’s last functioning public hospital. “The patients come from everywhere, and we have to take care of them,” Dr. Saint-Surin told Elder. “Where else will they go?”

The facility needs more of everything — materials, capacity, professionals — to keep up, Dr. Saint-Surin said. “We are giving care with heart, with what we have ... It's a fight every single day.”

At the Jean Marie Cesar school, an internal displacement site in Port-au-Prince hosting 3,000 people uprooted by violence, a pregnant mother fills a bucket with safe drinking water from a source supplied by UNICEF while her child stands by watching.
UNICEF is helping to ensure access to safe drinking water for children and families staying at displacement sites in Port-au-Prince. Armed groups have taken control of 85 percent of the capital city. © UNICEF/UNI727243

The Jean Marie Cesar school in Port-au-Prince has been turned into a shelter for internally displaced families. It currently hosts 3,000 people. While at the site recently, Gianluca Flamigni, UNICEF Chief of Child Survival and Development for UNICEF Haiti, spoke with 13-year-old Dieussica, asking her what children living at the site need most.

"Most importantly, they need education," she told him. "Too many young people are carrying weapons."

For children and adolescents who have had their education interrupted by violence, UNICEF, together with the Ministry of Education and other partners, continues to support schools and organize catch-up classes and non-formal learning opportunities as well as vocational training.

For many internally displaced children and families staying at Jean Marie Cesar school and other displacement sites, there is nowhere to sleep but on the ground, and accessing safe drinking water is a struggle.

“UNICEF can make a difference by providing water through water trucking, by providing hygiene kits, by chlorinating the water,” Flamigni said.

UNICEF also supports mobile health clinics providing nutrition screenings and treatment for malnutrition, vaccinations and vitamin A supplements. “These mobile clinics save lives,” Flamigni said. 

Other UNICEF-supported interventions include mental health and psychosocial support services for children, parents and caregivers, at both mobile and fixed child-friendly spaces and across communities.

Flexible funding allows humanitarian responders to stay agile

Flexible, unearmarked funding is the best way to support UNICEF's emergency response in Haiti, because it allows UNICEF and its partners on the ground to stay agile, and to deploy resources where they are needed most at any given time. This is especially crucial in crises like Haiti's, where conditions on the ground are continually changing.

“Haiti and its children are crying out for sustained, long overdue international support,” Elder said. “But you know, there’s an expression here: ‘We are like a reed — we bend, but we don’t break.’”

Individuals he encountered during his visit, Elder added, “are people with an unshakeable will to rebuild and protect their communities despite the chaos surrounding them.”

Learn more: Read UNICEF's 2025 humanitarian action plan for Haiti.

UNICEF continues to call for all parties to end violence and halt grave violations of children's rights in Haiti, including the recruitment and use of children by armed groups, and all forms of sexual violence. UNICEF also calls for the unimpeded access of humanitarian workers to safely reach vulnerable communities, including displaced populations in need.

“Children in Haiti are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did not create," said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. "They rely on the Haitian Government and international community to take urgent action to protect their lives and safeguard their futures."

 

 

 

TOP PHOTO: In Port-au-Prince on Jan. 27, 2025, UNICEF Global Spokesperson James Elder interacts with students during a visit to a school that UNICEF and partners relocated from La Saline in 2023, after students got caught up in a clash between two rival armed groups. © UNICEF/UNI728201/Erol

HOW TO HELP

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War, famine, poverty, natural disasters — threats to the world's children keep coming. But UNICEF won't stop working to keep children healthy and safe.

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