Haiti – Advocacy note: Scaling up the quality of water, sanitation and hygiene services: an entry point to save lives in Haïti (September 2023) – Haiti

Haiti is facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis with persistent political instability, rising inflation and recurring disasters. On 17 April 2023, the inter-agency standing committee IASC emergency level L3 was declared for 3 months in order to increase the capacity of the humanitarian response. The slowness of the system and the complexity of the crisis prompted senior management to agree to its extension until 14 October to ensure that the necessary mechanisms for humanitarian response are in place to respond to the growing needs of affected people. The WASH sector is therefore working on four specific operational objectives: responding to the IDP crisis, preparing for and responding to climatic hazards and earthquakes, responding to the cholera epidemic, and the protection crisis. In view of the latest IPC and SMART survey results, the sector must also rapidly mobilize to tackle food insecurity and malnutrition, and provide a multi-sectoral response. Since the beginning of the year, violence perpetrated by armed groups in the Port-Au-Prince Metropolitan Area (ZMPP) and Bas-Artibonite has displaced more than 194,624 people of which 61,200 have taken shelter in about 50 spontaneous sites. The cholera epidemic which was declared in October 2022, and after 3 years of no reported cases, is not to be underestimated. Haiti is one of the top 5 countries in the world in terms of reported cases between 20 July and 31 August 2023. As of 8 September 2023, the country had reported 61,770 suspected cases of cholera since the start of the epidemic , with 603 institutional deaths and 252 community deaths (case-fatality rate over 1%, and as high as 6.5% in some departments). The entire country is affected by the epidemic, with over 75% of communes reporting at least 1 confirmed case. High inflation is fuelled by the depreciation of the gourde’s exchange rate against the US dollar and by the rising cost of transport. Together with the insecurity climate, this continues to reduce the purchasing power of the poorest households, who are forced to resort to unsustainable livelihood strategies.