Yemen: Eight years on, children continue to suffer

Season 4, episode 4

Yemen: Eight years on, children continue to suffer

Eights years into the conflict in Yemen and many children have known nothing but war in their lives. Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s representative in Yemen speaks about what is being done to build resilience in communities and what the current challenges are in terms of education and nutrition.

Host: Saara Chaudry, UNICEF Canada Ambassador

Guests:

Peter Hawkins, UNICEF Representative, Yemen

Waleed Al- Ahdal, Al-jufainah IDP camp resident, Yemen

Producers: Sara Faruqi and Priyodarshini Mitra

Composed and Mixed by: Chandra Bulucon

Episode Transcript: 

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[00:00:03.60] It has been eight years of war in Yemen, eight years of food shortages, eight years of lost education, and eight years of extreme poverty. But it has also been a time of different partners coming together to ensure health care providers are able to reach the most remote of communities, that children have access to schooling, that therapeutic food reaches those who need it most.

[00:00:30.78] Hello, everyone, and welcome to For Every Child podcast. I'm your host Saara Chaudry. And on this month's episode, we will talk about Yemen, an emergency often overlooked despite being one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world.

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[00:01:03.02] In Yemen, nearly 75% of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance. That includes almost 13 million children. More than 80% of the country's population struggles to access sufficient and nutritious food, safe drinking water, and adequate health care.

[00:01:23.92] Peter Hawkins is UNICEF's representative in Yemen, and he joins us to talk about the crisis and what is being done to mitigate it and help children recover and resume their childhoods. Hi Peter, thank you for joining us.

[00:01:38.45] So Yemen is one of the toughest places in the world to be a child. Malnutrition and wasting have continued to worsen in the country due to the pandemic and other factors, like the war in Ukraine, which has escalated global food shortages. Can you tell us about how UNICEF is addressing this crisis in Yemen?

[00:01:59.29] The conflict has broken a lot of the sort of food chain that would exist in normal time. Food will have to cross lines. But the most important thing is actually increase the amount of poverty, or we call it as multidimensional poverty, where children don't have access to health care, don't have access to education, or don't have access to food in itself.

[00:02:23.54] And what we're seeing in many families that has been exacerbated not only by the conflict, but with the subsequent economic collapse, and the levels of poverty have increased substantially. But what it means is that children, and especially children, don't have access to the right type of food. And that is the critical factor here, or sufficient food, which is the compounding factor in this case.

[00:02:51.07] So you take a child in Hudaydah. Hudaydah is on the coast-- the Western coast of Yemen-- beautiful-- on the coast of the Red Sea. This is the most magical sea that you can be by. And yet, the food production has been affected by the conflict.

[00:03:10.66] And not only food production, but food-- bringing food into that area is expensive. But people's livelihoods has been so drastically affected that their ability to be able to access food and the right types of food is compromised.

[00:03:27.94] Wasting is where a child has not had sufficient food at all and is deteriorated to an extent whereby their body mass is reduced considerably. In some governance in Hudaydah and Hajjah and Saada, we're seeing the levels of wasting or malnutrition as high as 25%, 26% in some areas. Now, that is verging on what other people might call famine. I mean, that's verging on a crisis of exceptional degree.

[00:04:02.02] The compounding impact of both stunting and of wasting is such that if, for example, now-- and the rainy season is coming-- you start getting measles outbreaks and other such things. If the vaccination program does not keep up with the outbreak of, say, for example, measles, it's compounded by the fact that the malnutrition is weakened, or has weakened them. The two coming together is almost a death sentence.

[00:04:33.50] So 22,000 cases of measles so far in this period, in this quarter of this part of the year. And with high malnutrition going into a season where there's rains and diseases becomes common that we would expect mortality rate to go up considerably over the next few months.

[00:04:55.46] What we are trying to do at UNICEF is ensure that, one, in the high-risk governance that we pre-position high-value food-- it's called RUTF-- so that children who are malnourished or showing signs of severe and acute malnutrition, we do have pre-positioned RUTF so that they can take a course of treatment.

[00:05:20.74] But at the same time, we're trying to work with the authorities to expand the coverage of measles vaccine, for example, to prevent the crisis from being compounded and children being weakened by both measles and malnutrition with severe consequences.

[00:05:39.60] Now, there are 2,600 primary health care centers that we support around the country. So people do have access to them. But as you can imagine, mainly in areas where traditionally the demographic was quite high, that's where human resources-- that's where the primary health care center has survived. Whereas, in the rural areas or the areas towards the north, especially where a lot of the conflict affected, those primary health care centers are no longer available to people.

[00:06:11.87] So what we're trying to, especially for the displaced people where the demographic has changed, is do either extension outreach programs from the health centers into the communities, the more rural communities or into the displaced camps-- displaced people's camps. But also, looking at mobile teams-- these mobile teams with medicines, with vaccine, and with some sort of midwifery support go round from village to village to support those children.

[00:06:48.28] Thank you, Peter. That's very insightful. I want to move on to another topic that's often impacted by conflict, and that's education. Can you tell us a little bit more about the state of education in Yemen right now?

[00:07:01.83] There is a serious crisis around education. This is brought about by, one, the conflict; two, the economic collapse; but three, the lack of governance and real investment in education. Because the government, which is the internationally recognized government, has very little resources. And the authorities up here in Sanaa have no form of resource mobilization.

[00:07:27.96] So you don't have, like in any other country, an investment in a service. There's no investment in schools. There's no salaries for teachers. There are no salaries for health workers and so on. And they rely almost exclusively on the United Nations to be able to undertake that. And we provide not only the means by which they can deliver those services, but also the money to pay the staff and so on.

[00:07:55.42] And education per se, out of the 10, 11 million children who should be at school-going age-- 2 million, so 20%, roughly-- are out of school children, do not go to school. That, in itself, is a crisis, let alone what is happening in the schools itself.

[00:08:17.14] What does that mean in a country like Yemen if you do not go to school, is you have no learning opportunities. You will be illiterate. You'll be enumerate. You won't have any life skills. You will learn with what is around you, and not all of that is good.

[00:08:33.06] And you will be affected by child labor. You will be affected by teenage or young marriage-- less than teenage in many cases. You will be affected by a lack of protection, and that is the life.

[00:08:48.78] So what has your experience been like working in the country and seeing the impact and severity of the conflict on children and families?

[00:08:57.79] I've been to most parts of Yemen now. It's an-- as you know, it's an incredible country-- beautiful like no other country in the world-- a very, very topography-- high mountains, deep ravines, beautiful sea, and amazing plateaus, and then into the desert. But that hides a sort of brutal issue around access to education. How do children-- how do we get schools closer to communities, and how do you get schools which have been damaged fixed-- damaged because of the war fixed?

[00:09:35.01] My first reaction was my own safety, and that was quickly moved to the safety of the 30 young children that were sitting on the floor in that classroom. And they were enthusiastic. They were desperate to learn. But they were in a perilous situation, which will never improve until an alternative was found.

[00:10:02.22] They seem to be OK. But one day that building is going to come down. Those children are not only going to lose their lives, but they're going to lose their only form of education.

[00:10:14.94] I went outside. There were 12 young ladies who were at 11th grade. This is fantastic-- two of them with their own children with them. They were sitting under a tree on the floor, and the blackboard, as it were, was on a wall.

[00:10:32.01] Again-- enthusiastic, wanting to learn, but in an environment was not conducive to their well-being. Nor did they have any textbooks. Nor did they have any other materials to allow them to really take it forward.

[00:10:47.01] Those are the lucky children. They're in a school. They've got teachers. Most of the teachers are volunteers. Some of them are paid for by UNICEF as an incentive. But they're the lucky ones.

[00:11:01.32] Can you imagine if you were somewhere in Canada, and you had to sit on the floor, no protection from the elements around you, and to learn in a place which is dangerous to your own life? That's it. That's the lucky-- those are the lucky ones. Can you imagine with the ones who are less lucky?

[00:11:24.98] What we're doing as UNICEF, together with other organizations, is trying to rehabilitate these sort of schools in the best way we can. One, obviously to make it safe.

[00:11:36.56] Two, to provide the basic requirements so that they can sit at a desk. They have a blackboard that works. They are covered from the elements. And here it's both cold and very, very, very, very hot. And both seasons are uncomfortable unless you're covered by the elements.

[00:11:55.49] When you go down to the coast, which I did in another school, you're sitting at the coast where the humidity is very, very high and the heat is some of the hottest places in the world. Again, you're trying to learn in an environment which is not conducive to learning.

[00:12:13.67] But we're doing our best. And everyone is looking at the solutions. Everyone is trying to adapt and move forward, but for only 70% to 80% of the lucky ones who have access to some sort of educational facility.

[00:12:30.14] I think there are three things that we're really trying to do and push. One is rehabilitate schools as quickly as we can. We're scheduled to rehabilitate 1,200 schools, which is only a fraction of the number of schools that need to be done.

[00:12:46.77] And when you rehabilitate them, it could be to block off the bombed-out shelters and rebuild classrooms and that's it. But it's $10,000 per classroom, and $2,000, which I'll come onto, for the equipment and so on in that classroom. You can accommodate up to about 50 children-- 25 in the morning, 25 in the afternoon. So it's not much. It takes a little resources compared to the cost of not having s child go to school.

[00:13:23.66] Sometimes we hear all these numbers, and it seems like such an impossible task to recover from-- extreme poverty, so many out of school children, over a million pregnant and lactating women malnourished, the number of children under five who aren't getting nutritious food, and millions of people displaced. So with active conflict in parts of the country and a massive economic crisis, what do you see looking ahead to the future?

[00:13:54.91] The critical thing here is building the resilience of children and the systems in Yemen. This doesn't take much to do. And while at the moment we're in a situation where there's no war, no peace, we're investing heavily.

[00:14:12.09] We're working hard to build those systems up, building the primary health care system, building the educational system up at a decentralized level. So in government, by government where the communities can be involved and can take forward.

[00:14:26.16] We are working every day, every month, and every year to improve the lives of women and children, and that has been successful. But it's sustaining that. That's the big problem.

[00:14:37.45] So let's not make our success into a failure. Let's celebrate that success, and let's continue to be supportive of the women, girls, and boys in Yemen, wherever they are.

[00:14:51.81] The consequences of this conflict will be there for generations ahead. And we're trying to do as much as possible is alleviate some of those-- psychosocial care for children, life skills for children and their teachers, work around gender-based violence. All of these things-- and understanding better the gender dimension and what that means to communities.

[00:15:17.43] All of these things can be built up to help ensure that as we're hoping for peace, the families themselves, the communities themselves, are doing exactly the same and are well-positioned to be able to take on the opportunities for peace.

[00:15:32.91] Thank you, Peter. That is such a positive outlook and exactly why agencies like UNICEF and partners continue to work in Yemen and in some of the toughest places in the world.

[00:15:45.36] As Peter said, there is hope, even in times of extreme hardship. The work being done to build up resilience and communities will eventually create sustainable systems that the people of Yemen can take forward themselves when the conflict ends and peace comes.

[00:16:04.65] Before we end the episode today, I wanted to share the story of Waleed. It is the month of Ramadan, and for Waleed and his family, each Ramadan is harder than the last. The conflict pushed Waleed and his family out of their home in Western Yemen to a camp for the internally displaced in Al Jufainah. Living conditions are so harsh that he no longer thinks about preparing for the fasting month of Ramadan.

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[00:16:38.94] He says Ramadan has lost its shine. It has become just like any other month.

[00:16:46.56] His youngest daughter, two-year-old Ghosoon, was diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition. There are over 2 million children acutely malnourished in Yemen, and over 500,000 of them under the age of five, like Ghosoon are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, which can be fatal if not treated.

[00:17:09.16] [NON-ENGLISH]

[00:17:18.12] Ghosoon was referred to a nutrition center supported by UNICEF for treatment and nutritional supplements. Gradually, she regained her health, and Waleed is happy. [NON-ENGLISH]

[00:17:33.29] And this Ramadan is celebrating her recovery.

[00:17:38.23] Thank you for listening.

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