Almost every Yemeni child is in need of international help, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced yesterday.
Yemen, one of the world’s current major humanitarian crises, is witnessing its fourth year of the war, which has led to a nation-wide economic recession, deterioration of public services, food and medicine shortages, public budget collapse, high inflation, deepening poverty, and exacerbating the malnutrition crisis.
In an official statement, UNICEF said that it had resumed the third cycle of cash assistance across Yemen. “Nearly 1.5 million of the poorest families in Yemen – an estimated 9 million people – will benefit from emergency cash transfers with generous funding from the World Bank,” the UN organisation explained.
“Nearly every child in the country [Yemen] requires assistance amid a serious threat of famine and reoccurring outbreaks of diseases including diphtheria, cholera and acute watery diarrhoea,” UNICEF stressed.
Yemen’s “intense conflict,” the humanitarian organisation noted, has led to the killing and the injury of over 6,000 children in the past three and a half years. “The war has almost entirely paralysed vital infrastructures like water, sanitation and health.”
According to the UNICEF statement, most families in Yemen have depleted their financial resources, child marriage and child labour are increasing, and over two million Yemeni children are out of school.
