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NEW YORK, 24 January 2012 – The State of Kuwait has contributed $250,000 to UNICEF in Turkey to support UNICEF’s humanitarian response to victims of the Van earthquake. The support was announced by His Excellency Mansour Ayyad Al-Otaibi, Permanent Representative of Kuwait to the United Nations.

On 23 October 2011, an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale hit the province of Van in eastern Turkey. Some 604 people were killed and over 4,000 injured as dozens of buildings, including multi-story apartment blocks and schoolteachers’ lodgings, collapsed or were seriously damaged.

Due to continuing seismic activity and the assumption that most buildings have been damaged and weakened, much of the population in the affected areas, which had a total population of up to 600,000 – almost half of them children – was effectively left homeless. In many respects, normal life has not resumed.

Tens of thousands of people have left the region. Of these, about 35,000 are accommodated in state guest houses and other public buildings in other provinces. Most survivors remain in the region, living in tents, tent cities or in some cases container homes, in harsh winter conditions, pending other arrangements.

UNICEF’s response to this emergency has been prioritising interventions in the areas of education and child protection, concentrating its efforts in helping schoolchildren and children up to five years of age to regain a sense of normalcy in the aftermath of the emergency.

UNICEF has set up 40 classroom units, each made up of two specialised containers, and of 10 container-based washroom and sanitation units. In addition to the classroom units previously delivered, UNICEF has delivered eight container-based living units to accommodate 24 school counsellors/guidance centre staff, as well as supplied 190 recreation kits and 190 early childhood development kits, each containing sufficient materials for 50 children.

UNICEF is ensuring that psychosocial support is provided to all children affected by the emergency, including those who have lost family members and friends. UNICEF is training social workers to provide psychosocial support on a “tent-to-tent” basis and providing psychosocial support training to 237 guidance and counselling teachers and 215 Guidance and Counselling Centre personnel in Van.

UNICEF plans to provide further container units and other equipment and materials in this context, as well as early childhood development kits.

© UNICEF/NYHQ2011-2121/Dormino
Children participate in the creation of a one-minute video in Kenscoff, a community near Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

By Rudina Vojvoda

NEW YORK, 30 January, 2012 – With 43 per cent of its people under 18 years old, Haiti has one of the youngest populations in the world. Yet the country’s young people continue to suffer from a lack of opportunities and remain vulnerable in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

Listen to the Podcast in Streaming MP3 format

Before the quake, 55 per cent of children were missing out on their right to an education. Despite post-disaster efforts to return children to the classroom, many remain out of school. Additionally, issues related to child development receive little attention, especially outside urban areas.

To highlight the challenges faced by youth, UNICEF and partners PANOS Caribbean and Fondation haitienne d’Aide aux Vulnérables are providing media training to vulnerable children. In these trainings, young people learn how to use radio and video equipment, write reports and take pictures to bring attention to the needs and challenges facing their peers.

UNICEF moderator Femi Oke discussed this innovative program with three of its organizers: Margarette Altidor, President of Fondation haitienne d’Aide aux Vulnérables; Jean-Jacques Simon, UNICEF Haiti Chief of Communication; and Jan Voordouw, Programme Coordinator of PANOS Caribbean.

Youth participation

According to Mr. Simon, the project has successfully helped children address their concerns about education, health sanitation and other aspects of day-to-day life.

“We have created unique productions where you can understand what the children of Haiti are going through,” said Mr. Simon. “The scars are not completely healed, and one of the goals here is to prepare youth for the future. Building the future of this country is one big challenge, but it’s a challenge that youth must be part of.”

Discussing opportunities for young people, Mrs. Altidor called on Haitian institutions to play a bigger role in training and educating young people. “It’s not only a job for the international organizations, but Haitian organizations, too. Young people in Haiti should try to do their best,” said Mrs. Altidor.

Tools for survival

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the largest to strike the Caribbean in the last two centuries. More than 220,000 people were killed in the disaster, and over a million remained displaced one year later. During catastrophes like this, and in the recovery phase that follows, communication is a crucial survival tool.

“It is when the population needs the information the most,” said Mr. Voordouw, pointing out that the media skills children learned during their training were not only marketable talents for the participants, but a benefit to the community as well.

“In the Haitian culture, children can be seen but cannot be heard, so when it happens, [it] can be very useful,” he continued.

And the children’s stories are having an effect.

“The problems get solved,” Mr. Voordouw said. “We have had some indications that domestic violence went down after the children spoke about it.”

© UNICEF Haiti/2010

Taleen Vartan

NEW YORK, 28 July 2011 – Since 2007, the Education in Emergencies and Post-Crisis Transition (EEPCT) programme – a partnership among UNICEF, the Government of the Netherlands and the European Commission – has aimed to support countries in emergency and post-crisis transition situations as they seek to establish a viable path of sustainable progress towards quality basic education for all.

The first of the four goals of the EEPCT programme is to improve the quality of education response in emergencies and post-crisis transition countries and territories. This includes both the immediate onset of emergencies – when the task is to restore schooling to affected populations – and the more sustained period of reconstruction aimed at rebuilding the education system.

In Haiti, EEPCT funds have made a substantive impact on increasing the capacity of education delivery after the earthquake in January 2010. The programme is helping to rapidly restore quality education while ‘building back better’ for young Haitians – striving to get all children in school in a country where enrolment and attendance were poor even before disaster struck.

Restoring schooling after the quake

The earthquake led to the destruction or damage of nearly 4,000 schools in Haiti, which affected more than 1.2 million students. In 2010, UNICEF concentrated on restoring access to basic education in the context of nationwide school closures. EEPCT funds were applied for the distribution of 1,600 tents and school materials to set up temporary schools in April 2010, benefiting approximately 325,000 children – about 20 per cent of the total affected schoolchildren – in the aftermath of the quake.

The quality of education was improved through teacher training, child-friendly school initiatives, distribution of learning materials and strengthened parent and community inclusion in EEPCT programme activities. In 2010, more than 15,000 teachers have benefited from teaching materials in more than 2,000 schools. Additionally, school supplies were distributed to approximately 720,000 affected children in order to alleviate parents’ financial burden linked to school fees.

Improved water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in schools

Prior to the earthquake, 40 per cent of schools in Haiti had no access to drinking water and 60 per cent lacked sanitation facilities, directly exposing more than 873,000 children to waterborne diseases during their time in school.

In support of the national cholera prevention and response campaign, soap and water purification tablets were distributed to about 1 million children in 5,000 schools in affected areas. The provision of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation and hygiene facilities are essential components to ensuring a healthy physical learning environment.

Advocacy to reopen schools

Successful national and community-level advocacy remains another fundamental aspect to the first goal of the programme. UNICEF and partners worked with the Ministry of Education to forge a common commitment to minimize the duration of school closures in Haiti after the quake. This was important since a lost school year would have exacerbated the social impact of the disaster for children and delayed recovery efforts.

To operationalize this commitment to reopen schools as early as possible and to ensure that children do not have to repeat their studies, UNICEF and Education Cluster partners, together with the Ministry of Education, developed and disseminated an adapted curriculum to teachers for the remainder of the 2010 school year. The curriculum was devised for children who suffered an interruption in their schooling as a result of displacement and school closures.

Looking forward

In 2011, UNICEF is investing in improved access to and quality of education as well as in reform and regulation of the education sector. This means strengthening government capacity to lead, plan and coordinate, training more teachers and bolstering a fragile education system where more than half of the country’s children remain out of school. As the fifth and final year of the EEPCT programme moves forward, EEPCT funds continue to help the earthquake-affected children of Haiti regain hope and dignity and rebuild stable futures for themselves and their communities.

Related links:
Consolidated Report – Back on Track programme in 2010: Results achieved during the fourth year
Christine’s story: A 14-year-old Haitian student braves the aftermath of the earthquake
UNICEF Haiti (in French)

© UNICEF/NYHQ2010-0754/Roger LeMoyne
Children locate countries on an inflatable globe, during class in a tent set up on the grounds at an orphanage, in the city of Jacmel.

By Pi James

NEW YORK, USA, 6 January 2011 – UNICEF podcast moderator Amy Costello spoke with Carlos Vasquez, architect and UNICEF Education Specialist, and Tania McBride, UNICEF Communication Specialist for Haiti, to find out how the educational system is managing to move forward one year post-earthquake.

Ms. McBride, who recently returned from three weeks in Haiti, said the children she spoke with who had moved from school tents into semi-permanent structures seemed “really happy to be back at school”.

Listen to the Podcast in Streaming MP3 format

“One interesting thing about this,” Mr. Vasquez added, “is the fact that, believe it or not, children were afraid of going back to schools that were made out of bricks or reinforced concrete because they associate collapse with a certain type of construction.”

“That was also part of our initial design concerns when we were thinking about the semi-permanent schools,” Mr. Vasquez continued, “If you are able to pick on how children perceive space and how do they perceive the disaster, if you’re paying attention as an architect, you should be able to integrate their concerns into your design process.”

Psychosocial issues

Ms. McBride noted that while many children were now back in the classroom, many were still suffering deeper psychosocial problems.

“On the surface of it the children seem very happy at school, learning, playing with their friends, interacting with their teachers, but one particular mother [I spoke with] told me that her children weren’t actually doing so well,” Ms. McBride said.

“Her youngest daughter, who was about five,” Ms. McBride continued, “didn’t sleep well at night, they didn’t like to be separated from her for too long, and she, as a parent, didn’t like to be separated from her children.”

Mr. Vasquez said going forward it is “fundamental that as an organization, as political institutions, we all agree on certain basic things that would enhance the security of the school environment both from an humanitarian perspective and from a disaster risk reduction perspective.”

© UNICEF/HTIA2010-00018/Marta Ramoneda
Alcema (red shirt) , 14, talks about the hygiene session that has taken place in the camp where he lives, in Port au Prince, Haiti.

By Pi James

NEW YORK, USA, 6 January 2011 – The children of Haiti suffered multiple crises in 2010, from the January 12 earthquake, to the devastation caused by Hurricane Tomas, and the outbreak of cholera in October – all of which seriously affected children’s access to education.

According to the UNICEF report on Haiti one year after the earthquake, cholera, a bacterial infection spread through water and food, has claimed more than 2,500 lives and affected more than 100,000 people.

Listen to the Podcast in Streaming MP3 format

In the lead up to the one year anniversary of the earthquake, UNICEF podcast moderator Amy Costello spoke with Dr. Ralph Ternier, Director of Community Care and Support with Zanmi Lasante/Partners in Health, an American non-profit organization that has been providing healthcare to Haiti’s poor for more than 20 years.

Dr. Ternier said that protection against the spread of cholera was complicated, particularly given the living conditions of many communities in rural Haiti.

“First of all there’s no sanitation,” said Dr. Ternier, “and then [the children] don’t have enough education to know [clean] water or that they should wash their hands. And you can go to some houses where you’re never going to find something to wash your hands”.

“If the people are educated and have somewhere to wash their hands, it’s OK, fine, we have the solution of cholera. But… it’s not that simple,” he continued.

Dr. Ternier stressed there needed to be a combination of education, to produce behavioural change, as well as the immediate response of vaccines and antibiotics.

“It’s all very complex; it’s not as simple as soap and education.”

Full transcript and bio of Dr. Ralph Ternier

©UNICEF/Haiti/2010/McBride
Christie Lafontant and her classmates back in school at Ecole Vision Nouvelle.

11 January 2011 – NEW YORK

January 12 marks one year since the deadly earthquake that devastated Haiti’s education system and affected millions of children.Twelve months later UNICEF and partners are focused on rebuilding efforts to ensure children can access quality education in a safe environment. Below are a series of stories on the role education has played in the reconstruction efforts one year on.

Podcasts

Rebuilding Haiti’s education system one year after the earthquake
Educating against cholera in Haiti

Stories

Building education from the ruins
Christine’s story: A 14-year-old Haitian student braves the aftermath of the earthquake
A Haitian engineer helps UNICEF rebuild education from the ruins

UNICEF report

Haiti: One year report (education excerpt)
Children in Haiti: One Year After – The long road from relief to recovery

October 2010

Since the beginning of the month children in Haiti have streamed back to school amidst challenges in securing proper learning spaces, materials and teachers. The Global education cluster, the body designated by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) to lead education recovery in humanitarian response, has estimated that over 2,890,000 children will be back in school for the 2010-2011 school year.

Since the January earthquake, education cluster partners have set up 2,220 temporary learning spaces to replace destroyed schools, while approximately 439 semi-permanent schools have been built or are under construction.

Escaping poverty through education in post-earthquake Haiti from UNICEF: Back on Track on Vimeo.

Additional support to students through the national school feeding programme supported by the WFP, World Bank and USAID provides meals to over 2,200,000 students daily.
Watch Christine’s story below to see what the education response mean to children on the ground in Haiti.

By Jill Van den Brule

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 31 August 2010 – Christine, 14, lives in a camp for displaced people near the international airport here in the Haitian capital. “The only thing I know is that I know nothing,” says this energetic girl, who cites Socrates as her motivation for going to school.

© UNICEF video
Christine, 14, lives in a camp for displaced people near the international airport in Port-au-Prince. A student at one of the few public schools in Haiti where fees are relatively affordable, she hopes to become a doctor.

“A person without education is a life without examination,” she says, paraphrasing the ancient philosopher. “You have to study and study to be a big philosopher, a great intellectual.”

And Christine has done just that, even though she was out of school for three months following the earthquake that struck Haiti in January, destroying her home and displacing her family.

Siblings not in school

Christine’s tattered notebooks, filled with detailed anatomy sketches, are a testament to her desire to become a doctor.

“I want to see with my own eyes what’s in the body and understand how my heart beats,” she says. “Like the Haitian singer named Jean-Jean Roosevelt says, if we give the world to women, the world would be marvelous, because girls have hearts.”

And Christine’s heart goes out to her siblings, who are not in school.

Her 15-year-old brother, Jean Renee, has been out of school since just before the quake, when he was forced to drop out. His mother could not afford to pay the school fees and had to make the difficult choice of sending just one of her three children to classes. Now Jean Renee goes to a family friend’s garage each day to work as a mechanic’s apprentice.

“If I cannot send him to school, I want him to at least learn a trade and stay out of trouble,” says his mother.
Meanwhile, Christine’s sister Afenyoose, 9, longs to go to school but cannot because it is simply too expensive.

‘My mother is my life’

Christine attends one of the few public schools in the country where fees are relatively affordable. But most of Haiti’s schools are private, creating a major barrier to education.

“I feel very, very sad that I go to school and my little sister doesn’t,” says Christine. “I try to teach her what I’ve learned every evening when I come home from school.”

© UNICEF video
A temporary learning space provided by UNICEF, which is in the process of transforming hundreds of tent schools into semi-permanent structures to help Haitian children realize their right to education.

Even for Christine, however, there are barriers to education. For example, teacher absenteeism is a reality in Haiti, because many teachers do not have the resources to get to their jobs.

“I sometimes don’t want to go to school because our teachers are not there,” says Christine. “My mother says, ‘Go to school, there may be teachers who will be in the classroom.’ She always gives me the strength…. My mother is my life.”

In the displacement camp, Christine’s mother sells second-hand tennis shoes that she gets on consignment. She meticulously cleans them with a toothbrush. This is how she supports her family and pays her daughter’s school fees. Her objective is to get out of the camp and give her children a better life.

“My mother wasn’t able to study. This is why she wants us to go school, so we don’t go through the same difficulties she did,” says Christine.

Rebuilding schools

The earthquake that shook Haiti destroyed or damaged some 4,000 schools. UNICEF’s priority in education has been to re-establish these schools as quickly as possible.

© UNICEF Video
A school in downtown Port-au-Prince that was reduced to rubble by the January earthquake. A major obstacle to building new schools in Haiti is removing the debris from destroyed old schools.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, temporary learning spaces were set up in large tents with water and sanitation facilities adapted to children’s needs. These temporary tents are being transformed into semi-permanent structures.

“I went to see my school after the quake,” Christine recalls. “The primary school next to our school had collapsed on top of my school, crushing a part of my classroom and the head teacher’s office. Now we are in learning in a tent, and it’s very hot.”

It’s clear that education is Christine’s lifeline – as it could be for all of Haiti’s children.

“I want the government to rebuild our schools, because there are children who will come after us,” she says. “Without education, there is no life, because education elevates man to the dignity of his well-being.”

© UNICEF/NYHQ2010-1206/Roger LeMoyne
A girl smiles during class in a tent at Celie-Lilavois Primary School in Port-au-Princel. Some 4,700 schools were damaged or destroyed by the earthquake, affecting some 700,000 school-age children. The new school year brings both challenges and opportunities for girls in Haiti.

By Anna Azaryeva

NEW YORK, USA, 13 October 2010 – As schools open for the new academic year in Haiti, the hope is to bring all boys and girls to school, those who attended before the earthquake struck in January 2010, and those hardest to reach, who will go to school for the first time.

Providing girls and boys with a safe and nurturing educational environment is a priority in Haiti. However, as 1.3 million Haitians are still displaced 10 months after the earthquake, adolescent girls remain one of the most disadvantaged groups. Factors including disparities and poverty put Haitian girls and young women at risk before the earthquake, and now, living in displacement camps, they are particularly vulnerable to sexual and other forms of violence.

UNICEF Radio podcast moderator Amy Costello spoke with Judith Bruce, Senior Associate and Policy Analyst with the Population Council’s Poverty, Gender, and Youth program, and Michelle Trombley, UNICEF’s Gender-Based Violence Specialist in Haiti, about the situation for adolescent girls in Haiti, both in camps and at school.

Listen to the Podcast in Streaming MP3 format

Girls at risk

“The situation for adolescent girls in Haiti has been increasingly difficult,” said Michelle Trombley, who is leading UNICEF’s response to violence against women and girls in Haiti. “Schools have just started. For a lot of children, this is going to be the first time back in an actual building structure since the earthquake, so there are many different levels of stress that are facing girls.”

“There was very little focused on girls, particularly the youngest girls, who have become the rising proportion of the reported rapes and other kinds of violence,” said Judith Bruce. “The work we have done is showing that most of youth programmes, in fact, are dominated by older males who are threatening to these girls, so very early on girls start dropping out and the least empowered girls just do not show up.”

“There is nowhere to hide in the camps,” explains Michelle Trombley. “There is really no space that girls have to find safety and security or to even talk about issues that they have going on.”

Dedicated spaces for adolescent girls

To empower and protect Haitian girls, AmeriCares and the Population Council co-founded the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network. This coalition of humanitarian organizations aims to reduce girls’ risks of poverty, violence, and rape by supporting the creation of dedicated safe spaces for adolescent girls.

“Girls need a space where they can go to regularly and reliably, at least weekly, at least for two hours, where they can be themselves – essentially a place where they can talk about their concerns and the stress they are under,” said Judith Bruce. “The specific theory, with good evidence now, is that girls who have strong friendship networks are much better protected.”

Empowering and protecting girls

© UNICEF/NYHQ2010-1282/Marta Ramoneda
Nine-year-old Rachel(name changed) was kidnapped near the tent camp where she was living with her sisters after the earthquake. She was raped and badly beaten. After Rachel returned from the hospital, the assaulter tried to attack her again. Dedicated spaces for adolescent girls can help girls build support networks and protect them from violence.

The start of a school year presents new challenges concerning girls’ safety at school, but also new avenues to empower girls. “There are a lot of opportunities to be working within schools, to be working with girls and with boys as well to raise their awareness about the issues and to be working with them more from the prevention point of view,” said Michelle Trombley.

For adolescent girls, having additional community-based opportunities is especially important. “When you have girls’ spaces, you can move directly into basic literacy which is often what’s missing”, said Judith Bruce. “There is a tremendous amount of confidence and asset-building that can be done in the community-based platforms.”

Judith Bruce explained that these programmes work particularly well in conjunction with school programs, especially when targeting the youngest girls in secondary school.

“They often are the ones who are the most likely to be victimized because they’re the youngest females in the setting,” she said. “I think there is a lot we can do with single-sex opportunities, and a lot we can do from community-based programs.”

©Ushahidi
Ushahidi maps up-to-date crisis information coming from Haiti via SMS, e-mail, radio, phone, social media and other sources.

By Anna Azaryeva

NEW YORK, USA, 11 March 2010 – The earthquake that shook Chile on 27 February reportedly killed hundreds of people causing widespread damage to homes, hospitals, schools, roads and other infrastructure.

Rescue and recovery efforts are underway while the start of the school year has been suspended for a week.

Meanwhile, intensive aid operations continue in Haiti, which was struck by a catastrophic earthquake just weeks before. The quake affected an estimate of 5,000 schools and approximately 700,000 of primary school-aged children around the country.

While the international community is working relentlessly to alleviate the suffering in both countries, some quake survivors in Haiti and Chile have been harnessing the power of technology to seek assistance for themselves and their communities.

Podcast moderator Amy Costello speaks with Patrick Meier, the Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi and a Co-Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning and Sree Sreenivasan, a journalism educator at Columbia University and a tech reporter for DNAinfo.com about the use of technology for crisis mapping in disaster areas.

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Technology helps target the relief

“Ever since the Tsunami in 2004, we saw what the web or real time internet could do to play the major role in relief and information,” says Sree Sreenivasan.

An online mapping tool Ushahidi, first developed in Kenya, has enabled Haitians, and now Chileans, to use cell phones, e-mail or even Twitter to communicate with aid workers trying to reach them.

“What we’ve done with Ushahidi platform in Haiti is to provide up-to-date, comprehensive picture of what the situation in Haiti was like starting from just the few hours after the earthquake itself,” says Patrick Meier. Two hours after the quake Ushahidi began to receive e-mails, text messages and tweets about damages and people trapped and map this information on an interactive platform.

This technology could prove promising for school children in disaster areas. In Haiti, the site was used to report a missing person who was buried beneath the rubble of a university. In future disasters, at-risk children, teachers and professors might be more easily found and assisted by aid workers utilizing this technology, known as crisis mapping.

A voice in rebuilding the country

As reconstruction and development efforts begin in Haiti, the Ushahidi platform will collaborate with the Haitian diaspora to empower individuals in the country to have a voice in how their country is being rebuilt.

“I think we will see more and more focus now in the post-disaster stage on things like education,” says Mr. Meier, “especially in the development stage when the new schools are built.” Individuals in Haiti will be able to use the platform to express whether the schools are built based on the needs of their towns and communities.

Mr. Sreenivasan thinks social media and technology will play an important role not only in fundraising and sharing information on what works or not in reconstruction, but will also help hold governments accountable during this process.

*********

Patrick Meier is a Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi. He’s also Co-Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning and a co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers and the International Conference on Crisis Mapping.

Sree Sreenivasan is a journalism educator at Columbia University who works to help journalists and consumers use technology in smarter ways. He’s a tech reporter for DNAinfo.com and a co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association.

Click here to listen to other podcast in the “BEYOND SCHOOL BOOKS” series.

© UNICEF/NYHQ2010-0167/Noorani
Steve Cherival (left), 8, and Richard Cherival, 5, play with a board puzzle from a UNICEF Early Childhood Development kit at the Lakay Don Bosco Centre, a residential care facility for children in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

By Roshan Khadivi

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 17 February 2010 – The first day of school in a UNICEF tent classroom was a happy day for Yolanda Senatus, 9 – and a far cry from the tragic day she had experienced just a month earlier.

“I like to draw, sing and play with my friends. I am so happy today,” said Yolanda, who lost both her home and her school in the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January.

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12 February 2010: UNICEF correspondent Guy Hubbard reports on UNICEF’s efforts to get children back to school a month after the earthquake in Haiti.

Yolanda is from Mount Jacquot, a hard-to-reach area in the vicinity of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. The community is on top of a mountain that is accessible only by steep roads; at times, it’s even difficult for helicopters to land there. Nevertheless, a UNICEF supply team has delivered tents for the temporary school and a clinic in Mount Jacquot, as well as school kits, medicine and basic medical equipment.

The UNICEF team arrived at the location early one morning last week and helped community members set up the tents. Classes for 300 children began that day.

Two million affected

A full assessment of earthquake damage to Haiti’s education infrastructure has yet to be completed, but an estimated 90 per cent of schools in the Port-au-Prince area – and 40 per cent of schools in the southern port city of Jacmel and other stricken localities – were damaged or destroyed. This could mean that as many as 2 million children are being deprived of their right to education.

Working with the Haitian Ministry of Education, UNICEF is setting up 150 school tents for earthquake-affected children. The goal is to get all children back to school by early April.

“The temporary learning spaces will be used until the schools are rebuilt,” said UNICEF Education Specialist Andrea Berther. “In addition, UNICEF and the ministry are working to identify and quickly train teaching personnel.”

These efforts are critical because education provides children with a sense of safety and normalcy in times of chaos and crisis. Besides tent classrooms, UNICEF has started the distribution of 390 School-in-a-Box kits and 410 recreation kits in 10 rural departments where displaced quake survivors are now living. Each School-in-a-Box kit provides as many as 40 children with exercise books, pens, pencils and other learning materials.

Safe spaces for children

UNICEF is also establishing ‘child-friendly’ early-childhood and primary learning centres equipped with education supplies and learning materials, as well as access to safe drinking water and latrines.

“We will do an accelerated learning programme so the students do not lose the school year. This will be challenging in terms of coordination, but everyone is on board,” said Ms. Berther.

UNICEF and Save the Children, in support of the Ministry of Education, are now leading an education working group in Haiti. In addition to opening all primary schools, the goals for the next three months are to:

Ensure availability of temporary spaces for children and youth

Support national education authorities and administrators tasked with the coordination of the crisis response and eventual reconstruction of the system

Complete assessments and analyses to gain a fuller picture of educational needs in post-earthquake Haiti.

Community mobilization

In addition to its support for the Ministry of Education, UNICEF will encourage community mobilization to ensure that parent-teacher associations in affected areas are involved in the management and revitalization of the learning spaces.

The focus on education reflects the fact that the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti is a children’s emergency. Nearly 40 per cent of all Haitians are below 15 years of age, and recovery must start with children.

Moreover, UNICEF believes the unprecedented international commitment, support and funding seen since the earthquake struck must be used to build back better for all young Haitians. In the education sector, this means getting all children in school in a country where enrolment and attendance were poor even before disaster struck.

Back in Mount Jacquot, Yolanda continued to write and draw in her notebook. Her teacher, Onickel Paul, noted that the opening of the tent school had helped build trust, among the children and their parents, that things are getting better in Haiti.