SIGN UP FOR CHANNEL G NEWS
Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon
Yéle Haiti

Support The Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund

Description of the problem:


Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has an 80% unemployment rate.  The majority of the population, 8 million, lives off of less than $1 per day.  42% of children under the age of 5 suffer from chronic malnutrition and every hour, 1 Haitian child dies of starvation.  The average life expectancy in Haiti is less than 50 years, and in the US, it is 77years.  The maternal mortality rate in Haiti is 680 per 100,000 live births, and in the US, it is 17.  Out of 1,032 schools in Port-au-Prince, only 4 provide sports.  The infrastructure for sports does not exist due to lack of funds.  95% of students must pay tuition to attend school because the government does not have the money to support education.  With such a high unemployment rate, most people cannot afford to send their children to school, explaining the 60% illiteracy rate.  Less than 2% forest cover remains in Haiti.  As 68% of households do not have electricity, wood is used for basic survival¬ cooking.  Forest cover helps ease the devastating effects of hurricane flooding, like Hurricane Jeanne, which killed more than 3,000 Haitians in September of 2004.

Haitians in the slums of Haiti are so poor, they make patties out of dirt to eat.  Wyclef ate dirt patties as a child.

Description of the project/solution:


To aid with the problems at hand, Yéle Haiti is working with NGOs to implement 19 projects in Haiti.  Several of these projects include Primary School Scholarships which is providing 6,800 scholarships for primary school children in 6 different municipalities, University Scholarships supporting 10 top ranking poverty stricken students to attend universities in Haiti for 1 year underwriting tuition, food, books and public transportation costs, and L’Athlétique d’Haiti which providing core funding for an after-school soccer program for 650 youth from the worst slums in Haiti, Cité Soleil and Bel-Air.  A few others include Food Distribution which distributes free food from the World Food Programme on a twice-monthly basis and feeds 4,000 people in the slums, including Cité Soleil and Bel-Air, Project Clean Streets, which employs 1,700 people a day to clean the streets of Port-au-Prince, École Verte a monthly environmental education camping excursion that brings students to “Parc National La Visite” in Seguin where they learn about the environmental crisis and plant trees, and The Yéle Center- Fontamara which is the building of a series of centers serving youth through education, vocational training, health, sports and music.


Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Crackle, Imeem, Sclipo, Viddler, Howcast, 5min and Graspr