Attachments
HIGHLIGHTS
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South America and some countries in the Caribbean face overlapping emergencies, including migration, violence and climate change. These have compounded people's existing exclusion and vulnerability, leaving 17.2 million people, including 5.5 million children needing humanitarian assistance.
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UNICEF will continue to reach refugee and migrant children, vulnerable children from host communities and other people in need of support with essential child protection, education, water, sanitation and hygiene, health, nutrition and social protection services, mainstreaming gender and gender-based violence prevention and mitigation in its response. UNICEF will also strengthen preparedness to ensure that its country offices are equipped to respond to diverse crises and support partners and national capacities.
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UNICEF is requesting $177.4 million to meet the needs of 1.4 million children in 10 targeted countries, responding to the situation of children on the move and host communities, internally displaced people and, in some countries, children affected by violence, including vulnerable indigenous children.
HUMANITARIAN SITUATION AND NEEDS
South America and some countries in the Caribbean faces multiple crises that are political, social, economic and meteorological and environmental in nature. Increasing migration movements, violence, climate change, growing insecurity due to organized crime and an increase in energy and food prices – prompted by the war in Ukraine – will continue to impact countries in Latin American and the Caribbean in 2024, exacerbating people's exclusion and vulnerability and severely impacting children. In addition, such climate patterns as the El Niño phenomenon are expected to cause more extreme weather events in the region.
In Colombia, an estimated 7.7 million people, including 2.4 million children, will need humanitarian assistance in 2024 due to the impacts of internal armed conflict and extreme climate events. Children and adolescents face many crises, including conflicts, displacement, human mobility and malnutrition. With a limited institutional response and the presence of indigenous and Afro communities, who are particularly vulnerable to confinement and displacement, civilians continue to be affected by the reconfiguration of armed groups following the peace agreement that was signed in 2016.
Over the last decade, the Latin American and Caribbean region has been home to one of the largest refugee and migration crises in the world, largely due to the protracted socioeconomic and political crisis in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It is estimated that 9.5 million refugees and migrants linked to this crisis will be in need of humanitarian assistance in 2024. There are also smaller – yet significant – movements of people within the region, including those moving from Cuba and Nicaragua, those moving within and beyond the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru and the extracontinental flows of migrants and refugees arriving in the region from Africa and Asia.
Despite ongoing efforts by some governments in the region, refugee and migrant children continue to face substantial barriers accessing essential services, including social protection, in transit countries and at their destinations. And host communities struggle to meet the service and protection needs of migrant and local populations, causing additional strain on limited resources. Furthermore, tighter immigration measures taken by other countries create significant challenges. Migrants and refugees without official documentation find themselves stranded at border points without access to the most basic services. This leads them to travel along irregular pathways where they are exposed to violence including gender-based violence, trafficking and smuggling, particularly affecting women and girls. Moreover, refugee and migrant children are highly vulnerable to protection risks including violence, psychosocial distress and exploitation.