SW News: The director of the UN Children's Fund or UNICEF said on Thursday that the international community must take immediate action to improve conditions in Haiti else it is hard to imagine a decent future for the Caribbean country.

Catherine Russell, the head of the World Food Program, told reporters at a press conference at UN headquarters in New York, that the current condition of insecurity is unacceptable. Russell said collectively the world is failing the Haitian people.

She said that women and children are dying and that public places like schools should always be secure.

Nearly half of the population, or 5.2 million people, require humanitarian aid, including three million children.

The executive director stated that the institutions and services that children rely on are barely functional while armed groups hold sway over more than 60% of the nation's capital Port au Prince and some of its most productive agricultural regions.

She said it has been a worse year for Haiti with historic levels of starvation, crushing poverty, a collapsed economy, and a persistent cholera outbreak.

Flooding and earthquakes also made Haiti vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters.

A statement was issued on Wednesday from the independent UN human rights expert on Haiti, William O’Neill who recently concluded a 10-day fact-finding mission.

He found the country bruised by violence, misery, fear, and suffering. The human rights situation is dramatic, all rights are violated.

“Gangs continue to terrorize, especially in more than half of the capital Port-au-Prince, which has become a lawless zone. Women and girls continue to be raped by gangs, often collectively, to establish their control over the population. Beyond the gang violence that rages in the capital and has pushed tens of thousands to move, land grabbing by oligarchs in the Northeast has also driven thousands of peasants exposed to precariousness,” he wrote in the report.