In Haiti, Gangs Recruit Kids Because They Are Not in School

The number of internally displaced children in Haiti has increased by an estimated 60 per cent since March – the equivalent of one child every minute – as a result of ongoing violence caused by armed groups. Carlencia, 15 years old, stands in one of the more secluded coutyards of an IDP site in Léogâne. UNICEF/UNI601248/Le Lijour

Haiti’s media-savvy gang leader, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, controls most of the country’s capital, patrolling blockaded streets with an army of armed deputies, many of them children carrying semiautomatic weapons.

“We live in a country where there is no drinking water, where children can’t go to school and people can’t go around freely,” said Chérizier, according to an English translation done by France 24 in an exclusive report published in July.

The irony of the country’s most-notorious gang leader supposedly protecting children shows how desperate their situation has become in Haiti, said Taz Doriza Phiri, the chief of emergency for Unicef in Haiti. The arrival of a Kenyan-led police force in July in the capital, Port-au-Prince, to take back control of the city from armed gangs is having a limited effect so far. Corruption allegations already surrounding the new Transitional Presidential Council have engendered public skepticism over any ability to restore stability in Haiti.

“Even a gang leader is talking about advocacy for children’s rights,” Phiri said. Because many children are severely malnourished, the promise of a single meal can be enough to attract new members to gangs. Other children feel compelled to join to protect themselves and their families.

The United Nations Security Council named Chérizier as boss of the G9 Family and Allies, a powerful federation of gangs that led a coordinated effort to take control of Port-au-Prince earlier this year. According to a Council resolution approved in October 2022, the gang has been attacking civilian neighborhoods and disrupting the flow of fuel into Haiti. The resolution imposed sanctions on Chérizier, citing accusations that he has played an integral part in carrying out human rights abuses in the country.

Since the overall rise in gang violence in 2021 in the Caribbean island, people fleeing into displacement camps due to the chaos more than doubled in 2022 and again in 2023, according to data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. As of May 2024, nearly 600,000 Haitians have escaped their homes in response to the security crisis plaguing the heart of the country’s economic center.

Gang violence has been worsening systematic problems with keeping children in school amid the catastrophe. Every day, youth who are displaced from their homes are becoming increasingly malnourished, traumatized and exposed to coercion tactics by gangs. Yet, humanitarian workers say that the biggest damage to children and the future of Haiti is their loss of education.

Compounding systemic barriers

Deeply grounded in the legacy of colonialism, Haiti’s history has been marred by financial and political instability since it achieved independence in 1804. Although free education has been recognized as a right by the state’s constitution since its inception, financial obstacles have long influenced who has access to schooling. The situation has become an even greater challenge as the economy has stagnated over the last several years. Ninety percent of Haiti’s schools are private, requiring tuition fees that many families can’t afford.

Data collected by Unicef from 2017, years before the unraveling of the current crisis, found that only 54 percent of children finish primary school and that the attendance rate for secondary school drops to 21 percent for upper levels. In recent years, the political uncertainty in Haiti has forced many private schools to close due to under-enrollment.

Phiri of Unicef said that the disruption caused by Covid-19 in 2020 was especially damaging. Haiti’s limited broadband infrastructure hurt the prospect of remote learning for most Haitian students after schools closed when the pandemic struck. Kids had already lost over a year of school when the political fabric began to shred with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and gang influence began to rise in the absence of the state. The situation has been compounded by more than a decade of infrastructure damage to school facilities.

“We have the added issue of physical access,” Phiri said, explaining that while some schools are closed due to security concerns, many facilities in the Port-au-Prince metro area are being used as shelters for internally displaced people escaping the gang violence.

The fallout from the series of disruptions over the last four years has not let up. But Unicef Haiti said that it is seeking solutions to help children to continue their schooling in structured classes or informal methods like catch-up courses with tutors.

“These kids still need a place to learn,” Phiri said.

Unicef provides cash transfers for vulnerable and displaced Haitians to pay for supplies and uniforms. The agency is also scaling up efforts to support schools in provinces outside Port-au-Prince that may be experiencing higher enrollment due to the growing number of displaced students in their region.

A deep analysis of financing appeals by Unicef shows that global public interest in humanitarian aid tends to spike after natural disasters and wanes in succeeding years. This trend is most starkly observed in investments in Haiti’s education sector, where the years 2022 and 2023 saw a 50 percent drop in fundraising compared with 2021, when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake devastated the country’s southern peninsula.

The decline in investment in Haiti as the chaos continues is clear in the humanitarian response, particularly measured by the number of children that the aid is reaching. Unicef helped more than 80,000 conflict-affected children return to school in 2023 through the construction and rehabilitation of schools, deployment of teachers to hard-to-reach neighborhoods and distribution of cash transfers. Yet, the number of children that accessed education through these  investments represent a major drop from the 140,000-plus children that went to school through these programs in 2022, when Unicef used funds carried over from 2021.

Although Unicef has designated Haiti as a priority for funding allocation from the agency, Phiri said it still needs more support, particularly from private donors who may not grasp the urgency of the situation on the ground.

“It’s just not enough,” Phiri said. “The needs of this country at the moment are devastating.”

Because Unicef’s education and child-protection programs tend to be “human resource heavy,” according to Phiri, their programs are more costly than the distribution of goods, further constraining Unicef’s reach.

A major challenge that Unicef and its partners are trying to solve is the brain drain of professionals from the country, particularly educators and social workers amid the turmoil of the last few years.

“Education is key,” said Yasmine Sherif, executive director for Education Cannot Wait, a UN entity that partners closely with Unicef, the World Food Program and the Haitian Ministry of Education to fund programs in the country to help standardize curriculums and scale up public education. To increase professionalism in the education sector, this coalition is using international aid to train 2,000 teachers to enable tutoring and recovery classes before schools begin this fall.

Meeting the needs of IDPs

It is well known that schools are critical to children’s well-being. In Haiti, especially, they can give them a safe space to learn, availability to regular meals, time to socialize and build relationships with peers and the chance to be observed by professionals trained to recognize psychological problems.

“We have to make sure that every child receives all that they need,” Sherif said. She called the funding deficits by international donors and the private sector of recent years “irresponsible” and “not sustainable in the long run.”

Indeed, school buildings in Port-au-Prince are now housing thousands of displaced people who have nowhere else to go.

Despite efforts by humanitarian organizations to meet the needs of IDPs in these sites, a lack of resources has made conditions tense, prompting many parents to send their children to live with relatives or friends in other parts of the island, especially in rural areas. According to early insights from a household survey conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 56 percent of these households cite poor living conditions or food insecurity as the main reason they no longer live with their children, while 40 percent cited safety as their primary concern.

But IOM officials say that more than 35 percent of displaced people in the capital are minors and remain vulnerable to recruitment tactics by armed groups just to stay alive.

Over time, the widespread disruption driven by the gang violence has limited the supply of food, water, medical supplies and other critical goods for people living in community sites in Port-au-Prince as well as for Haitians throughout the country. Gangs offer not only access to basic yet coveted resources, status and a sense of purpose, but they also provide the illusion of safety for many children who are separated from their families or experiencing emotional distress living in the violent atmosphere of Port-au-Prince.

An IOM analysis of behavioral changes in children over the last several months found that almost 60 percent of households in the metro region or the Quest province in southwest Haiti said that their children are demonstrating behaviors more associated with negative emotions, including more than a third of respondents saying their children show an increase in anger, aggression, irritability or restlessness.

Using the most recent displacement data collected and published by IOM, the map of Haiti shows the immediate barriers to education that displaced children are confronting in different areas of the country. This information is based on responses collected by representatives of host communities and IDP sites on why children in their community are not attending school. Any commune where security was mentioned as an obstacle was immediately categorized as red. Of the remaining communes, those with respondents who cited distance, lack of transportation or an absence of qualified teachers were categorized as orange. Finally, of the remaining communes, those that cited insufficient resources such as school fees were categorized as yellow.

Yet, early insights from the IOM household survey revealed that more than 70 percent of the children who did not have access to any formal schooling during the 2023-2024 school year cited cost and transportation as the main reasons. Of the children who had some formal schooling, almost 40 percent attributed the disruption to a lack of teachers. Therefore, when security concerns are addressed in the red regions, other underlying transportation and resource barriers need to be taken care of before access is extended to all children.

Meanwhile, according to media reports, despite the early efforts of the Kenyan-led police force working with the Haitian National Police, the contingents appear to lack enough resources and officers to fully secure the capital.

Funding and firearms

Currently, global funding for humanitarian aid is mostly concentrated among a handful of predominantly Western countries (including Japan) focusing on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Ukraine, together representing more than 20 percent of total contributions from these donors, according to financials reported by OCHA earlier in August.

Yet, Haiti’s 2024 humanitarian response plan is less than 25 percent funded, with less than five months left in the calendar year.

“When you look at the overall military spending around the world, you’re no longer talking billions,” said Antoine Lemonnier, a spokesperson for IOM Haiti. “You’re talking trillions. So when people tell us that there’s not enough money to fund all the humanitarian relief we want, I would say you just have to look at where you spend money. There is money out there. It’s just a decision about where it goes.”

While most of Haiti’s civilian population is facing food insecurity, armed groups in Port-au-Prince are flush with expensive firearms and ammunition.

During an appeal to the UN Security Council in January 2024, Ghada Waly, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, raised concerns about an arms trafficking “blind spot” that has been enabling armed groups to amass costly arsenals from the United States. In a UNODC report released earlier that month, agency officials warned that rival gangs in Port-au-Prince were forming temporary alliances to coordinate the movement of firearms into Haiti with the backing of its economic and political elite.

Despite heightened efforts by UNODC and US authorities in Miami to crack down on the flow of high-caliber weapons, gangs had acquired enough firepower to overtake the Haitian National Police in a rebellion on Feb. 29, 2024. They released thousands of inmates from prisons, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents in the Port-au-Prince metro area to flee their homes.

Notably, in December 2022, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly announced that her government was imposing sanctions on “high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti,” naming three businessmen, Gilbert Bigio, Reynold Deeb and Sherif Abdallah, in the news release.

“Canada has reason to believe these individuals are using their status as high-profile members of the economic elite in Haiti to protect and enable the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs,” Global Affairs Canada said in a statement.

The US has remained silent on the allegations made against Bigio, a US-Haitian citizen and chairman of an industrial conglomerate, GB Group, which wields considerable control over the construction materials market in Haiti. The company operates in the US and several countries throughout the Caribbean. Records show that both Bigio and the former Haitian President Michel Martelly have held property and operated businesses out of South Florida.

When asked if the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (Binuh) would ask the Security Council to impose more sanctions on the alleged financiers of the armed-group operations, a spokesperson for the UN mission said that sanctions are “an effective tool to discourage destabilization attempts by spoilers and criminals,” but that “it is up to the Security Council to decide to sanction.”

GB Group and former President Martelly did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Most of the households surveyed by the IOM said that the best way to improve education in their community is opening more schools. “We have programs to rebuild schools,” Lemonnier said. “Those came to a stop in March, but we are slowly, with security in mind, trying to start again.”

The international community faces a crossroads in Haiti as it tries to transition from a state marred by gang violence to a stable democracy through “a new generation of educated Haitian children that could then build the country,” Sherif said.

“Kenya alone cannot do this,” she added. “This is everybody’s concern — every country, not just neighboring countries, but the whole world — to ensure that Haiti can catch up and focus on recovery learning for all of those who missed out on school.”