UNICEF appeals for $3.9 billion to aid children affected by conflict, disaster

AMMAN — UNICEF on Tuesday appealed to the international community for $3.9 billion to support its humanitarian work for children affected by conflict, disasters and lack of protection services.

UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action for Children set out the agency’s 2019 appeal and its efforts to protect 41 million children in 59 countries across the globe, according to a statement sent to The Jordan Times. Funding for child protection programmes account for $385 million of the agency’s appeal and almost $121 million will go towards protection services for children affected by the Syria crisis.

“Today, millions of children living through conflict or disaster are suffering horrific levels of violence, distress and trauma,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said in the statement. “When children do not have safe places to play, when they cannot be reunited with their families, when they do not receive psychosocial support, they will not heal from the unseen scars of war.”

UNICEF estimates that more than 34 million children living through conflict and disaster lack access to 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.

Child protection services also include efforts to prevent and respond to abuse, neglect, exploitation, trauma and violence, according to the statement.

However, funding constraints, as well as other challenges including warring parties’ growing disregard for international humanitarian law and the denial of humanitarian access mean that aid agencies’ capacity to protect children is severely limited, the statement added.

“Providing these children with the support they need is critical, but without significant and sustained international action, many will continue to fall through the cracks,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s director of emergency programmes.

2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the landmark Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 70th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, according to the statement, which added that more countries are embroiled in internal or international conflicts today than at any other time in the past three decades.

UNICEF’s five largest individual appeals are for Syrian refugees and host communities in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, according to the statement.