OUANAMINTHE, Haiti, 11 March 2011— Small dirt paths dot the lush and hilly landscape outside the town of Ouanaminthe, on Haiti's north-eastern border. It is just one of a number of remote crossings child traffickers use to smuggle children into the Dominican Republic.UNICEF is working with the Haitian government and non-governmental partners to combat child trafficking. As part of this, the United Nations police force (UNPOL) recently began patrolling these unofficial borders.The scale of the problem becomes evident while accompanying the police on patrol. Hundreds of miles of border are inaccessible by car, and a lack of resources limits UNPOL's foot patrols."It's a bigger problem than yo...

Guatemala City, 7 March , 2011 (IPS) - Amarilis Chilel, 15, left her hometown of Ixchiguán in northwest Guatemala to work as a domestic in the capital: a common story among rural girls and women in Central America. "I went to school up to fourth grade," she told IPS.The teenager, who belongs to the Mam community, one of the main Mayan native groups in Guatemala, says her father tried without success to convince her to stay in school.But since she began working eight months ago, she sends him the equivalent of 43 dollars, exactly half of her monthly wage, to help support her three younger sisters.Chilel still dreams of becoming a schoolteacher. "Next year I'll go back to school," she says wh...

LIMA, Feb 16, 2011 (IPS) - "My classmates from Utupampa had to walk an hour to get to school," said Yasmín Sena, a young woman from a village in Peru's highlands. "That community is way up in the mountains; no cars can go there.""It was a really difficult and dangerous walk," especially when the girls had to make the trek home at night, the 18-year-old Sena, who is from Tumpa in the west-central highlands region of Ancash, told IPS. Although she managed to complete her secondary school studies, many of the other girls in her class dropped out, due to the numerous barriers standing in the way of education for girls in many of Peru's impoverished rural regions. A law was passed in Peru in 200...

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 21, 2011 (IPS) - Despite years of strong economic growth, record harvests and massive social assistance programmes, there are still places in Argentina untouched by the boom, where child malnutrition has even claimed lives.Hunger and malnutrition affect 53 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including nearly nine million children under five, according to United Nations statistics. Argentina is not one of the countries with the most serious problems of malnutrition, like Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Bolivia. But the question is that this country, once known as the "bread basket" of South America, produces enough food to feed its population of 40 ...