The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that millions of children living in countries affected by conflict and disaster lack access to vital child protection services, putting their safety, well-being and futures at risk and appealed for 3.9 billion USD to support them.
UNICEF said its Humanitarian Action for Children set out the agency’s 2019 appeal and its efforts to provide 41 million children with access to safe water, nutrition, education, health and protection in 59 countries across the globe. Funding for child protection programmes accounted for 385 million USD of the overall appeal, including almost 121 million for protection services for children affected by the Syria crisis.
UNICEF estimated that more than 34 million children living through conflict and disaster lack access to child protection services, including 6.6 million children in Yemen, 5.5 million children in Syria and 4 million children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Child protection services include all efforts to prevent and respond to abuse, neglect, exploitation, trauma and violence. UNICEF said it also works to ensure that the protection of children is central to all other areas of the organisation’s humanitarian programmes, including water, sanitation and hygiene, education and other areas of work by identifying, mitigating and responding to potential dangers to children’s safety and wellbeing.
UNICEF stressed that funding constraints, as well as other challenges including a growing disregard for international law by warring parties and the denial of humanitarian access, have limited aid agencies’ capacity to protect children severely. In the DRC, for example, UNICEF received just a third of the 21 million USD required for child protection programmes in 2018, while around one-fifth of child protection funding for Syrian children remained unmet.
UNICEF said while 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, more countries are embroiled in internal or international conflict than at any other time in the past three decades, threatening the safety and wellbeing of millions of children.
The five largest individual appeals were for Syrian refugees and host communities in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey (904 million USD); Yemen (542.3 million USD); The Democratic Republic of the Congo (326.1 million USD); Syria (319.8 million USD) and South Sudan (179.2 million USD)~ UNICEF
