A/HRC/25/71 calls for an urgent solution, will be taken up later in the report. For the time being, it should be noted that the State has planned to build at least 500,000 social housing units, but it is difficult to achieve this goal due, inter alia, to irregularities in the land ownership registration, according to the Government. 16. The situation regarding the right to health is also very serious. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 60 per cent of the population, mainly in rural areas, does not have access to basic health care.4 According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy at birth in Haiti was 63 years in 2011.5 The infant mortality rate in 2011 was 70 per 1,000 births and the maternal mortality rate was 350 per 100,000 live births. Government expenditure on health per capita almost doubled between 2008 and 2010, but is no more than 10 per cent of the State budget. Given the precarious financial situation of most of the population, it is not surprising that “traditional medicine plays an important role because it is the first resort for nearly 80 per cent of the population due to its low cost and proximity”.6 This situation has worsened with the cholera epidemic, which is referred to below. 17. The right to education is not guaranteed for almost half of the country’s children – boys and girls who do not go to school. In fact, approximately 80 per cent of schools are private; the absence of economic resources and very limited number of public schools are the main reasons for non-attendance. A significant portion of the adult population is illiterate. From 2007 to 2011, a quarter of young men aged between 15 and 24 and a third of the female population in this age group could neither read nor write.7 In 2003, “the degree of literacy [was] far better in urban than in rural areas (80.5 per cent versus 47.1 per cent).”8 According to UNICEF, less than 2 per cent of children of school age complete high school.9 The average number of years of education is 4.9.10 The Government informed the independent expert that the free and compulsory universal education programme allowed 1,399,173 children access to free basic education (first and second stages). 18. The very limited access to economic, social and cultural rights for the majority of the population reflects the profound inequalities of Haitian society, as aptly described by the Prime Minister before the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2013: “When President Michel Martelly became president, 76 per cent of the Haitian population lived in poverty, 56 per cent in extreme poverty. That, in a context of strong social inequality.”11 19. This inequality was analysed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its Human Development Report 2013,12 according to which Haiti has one of the lowest human development indexes (HDI) in the world, with 0.456 for the year 2012. Haiti is in 161st place out of 187 countries included. When this index is adjusted according to the 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 GE.14-10841 www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_2014.html. www.who.int/countries/hti/fr/. Pan American Health Organization, Le défi d’Haïti. La santé: un droit pour tous, Washington, 2005, p. 10. www.unicef.org/french/infobycountry/haiti_statistics.html#103. Republic of Haiti, Ministry of the Economy and Finance, Haitian Institute of Statistics and Information Technology, Le 4ème recensement général de la population et de l’habitat (2003). Available at the following address: www.ihsi.ht/rgph_resultat_ensemble_education.htm. www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_2014.html. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2013. Available at the following address: http://hdr.undp.org/fr/countries/profiles/HTI. Statement by the Prime Minister, Laurent Salvador Lamothe, during the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 26September 2013 (see A/68/PV.14). http://hdr.undp.org/fr/2013-report. 5