Emergency aid approved, water road, school improvement is main target.

The United Nations will launch later in 1991 a crash emergency aid programme to help the new democratically-elected Government of Haiti improve local roads and water supply, and rehabilitate school facilities and buildings.

Some 700 kilometres of local trunk roads in the impoverished, Caribbean island nation will be built to help to end the isolation of some areas before the next rainy season and 60 localities will receive safe water supply. The aid programme is expected to create some 3 million workdays of employment. Each of the proposed projects will take around three months, at an average cost of about $100,000.

The Haiti emergency effort was unanimously approved by the General Assembly on 17 May.

The programme, SecretaryGeneral Javier Perez de Cuellar reported (A/45/1002), will give the Haitian people "tangible proof that both the Government and the international community, beginning with the United Nations, are strongly committed to the democratization of the development process, the ultimate aim of which is to raise the people's standard of living through full participation by the people in decisions which affect them".

Mr. Perez de Cuellar said that Haiti does not have enough seed for the next growing season, because everything has been eaten. Haitian farmers often did not have even the most basic implements, such as hatchets and pickaxes, and were no longer able to feed their livestock. "There is a danger that endemic diseases such as anthrax and rabies will become more prevalent", he added.

A mission sent to Haiti by the Secretary-General in January and March to prepare the emergency programme, in consultation with the Government, reported that three quarters of the children suffered from malnutrition, half the school-age children did not attend class, and school facilities were either non-existent or extremely dilapidated. The only public hospital that is left in Port-au-Prince, the capital, had no running water and the country's major highway was barely passable.

Mr. Perez de Cuellar reported that the mission, headed by PaulMarc Henry, ascertained that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide wished to promote the welfare of the poorest social groups, namely, the inhabitants of rural areas".

The UN Observer Group for the Verification of the Elections in Haiti (ONUVEH) played a key role in successfully, seeing the nation through its first free and democratic elections in December 1990 and President Aristide's peaceful inauguration on 7 February. ONUVEH was the first UN election-monitoring operation in an independent nation not involved in a regional conflict.

Haiti is the most densely populated and poorest nation in the Americas. It is also one of the world's least developed countries, with a per capita income of about $350 a year and a 78 per cent illiteracy rate.

The infant mortality rate is 94 per 1000. Sixty per cent of the 6.6 million Haitians are estimated to be unemployed, some 23 per cent of the jobless in urban areas.