Social Issue

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere with 8.4 million inhabitants of which 4.2 million are children, and of them, 1/3 live in urban areas. The Haitian public health infrastructure has fallen into ruin due to the unstable historical, social, political, and economic context, which has caused 60% of the Haitian children to not have access to the most elemental health services. This causes the mortality rate of 5-year-old children in Haiti to be the highest of all of Latin America and the Caribbean, comparable to some of the Sub-Saharan African countries, caused by diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, acute diarrhoea, chronic malnourishment, etc.

More than half of the infant deaths are related to the lack of adequate food and the lack of medical and nutritional assistance. In Haiti, food insecurity reaches 40% of the Haitian homes, 65% of the children suffer anaemia, and 32% present delays in their development (data from UNESCO 2004).

Haiti has recently experienced a large increase in the cost of food, which has caused a large part of the population to have serious difficulty feeding themselves.

Our Response

The project’s objective is to provide urgent help to Haitian children that come from families that lack access to food due to the recent increase in prices.

The idea is to recover the health and nutrition of children that suffer from malnutrition and encourage them to attend school on a daily basis.

Expected Social Impact

The help program consists of the daily distribution of meals to 3,000 children that attend NPH schools located in the City Soleil and Wharf Jeremy neighbourhoods and children that visit the Sister Marcella nutritional clinic. Furthermore, each Tuesday food is given to 1,500 families at the St. Damien Chateaublond Hospital.

If the medical team detects cases that require urgent treatment at the hospital, they are immediately transferred there by the mobile medical unit and included within the hospital’s nutritional recovery programme.