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According to US AID, there are approximately 600,000 displaced people living in 416 makeshift camps in Port-au-Prince. Sanitation conditions in the camps remain a grave concern. With heavy seasonal rains fast approaching, the population is extremely vulnerable to exposure and water-born disease.

Two leading directors of Doctors Without Borders have called the relief effort to date "broadly insufficient." In a March 5 interview, they say that, “The lack of shelter and the hygiene conditions represent a danger not only in terms of public health, but they are also an intolerable breach of the human dignity of all these people.”

Conditions are also critical outside the earthquake zone. Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city located 120 km north of Port au Prince, has received an estimated influx of 50,000 refugees. Its mayor, Michel St. Croix, recently told the Miami Herald, “We need housing, sanitation, security -- we need everything.'' He said the city has received next to no assistance from the United Nations nor the International Red Cross.

In an interview with Associated Press on March 5, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive repeated his government’s growing concern with the international aid effort. "Too many people are raising money without any controls, and don't explain what they're doing with it."

Farmer warned against the “trauma vultures” descending on Haiti. He asked why so many years of aid and charitable funds going to Haiti has left the country poorer than ever.

Canada was one of the few large countries in the world that did not send civilian emergency rescue teams to Haiti. Its official aid mission arrived one week after the earthquake in the form of two warships and 2,000 military personnel. They pitched into the relief effort and earned praise for their work. But most of the assistance brought by the military, including its field hospital in Léogâne and its emergency health center in Jacmel, have now been withdrawn.

“The Canadian military is not a relief agency. It helped out with short-term needs. Aid and reconstruction is a long-term process. Who is going to pick up where the military’s work left off?”

Prior to the earthquake, Cuba had some 350 health professionals volunteering in Haiti. That number, including graduates and students from the Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in Cuba, has expanded considerably. Since 2005, 550 Haitian doctors have graduated from ELAM. The school received its first Haitian students in 1999. Currently, there are 570 students from Haiti attending the school.

Timely and informative articles and videos are also posted to the website of the Canada Haiti Action Network (http://canadahaitiaction.ca/) and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (http://ijdh.org/).

Ala’a,” a 16-year-old boy from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that Syrian security forces detained him for eight months, starting in May 2011, after he participated in and read political poetry at demonstrations. He was released in late January 2012 after his father bribed a prison guard with 25,000 Syrian pounds (US$436). During his detention he was held in seven different detention centres, as well as the Homs Central Prison. Ala’a told Human Rights Watch that at the Military Security branch in Homs: When they started interrogating me, they asked me how many protests I had been to, and I said “none.” Then they took me in handcuffs to another cell and cuffed my left hand to the ceiling. They left me hanging there for about seven hours, with about one-and-a-half to two centimetres between me and the floor – I was standing on my toes. While I was hanging there, they beat me for about two hours with cables and shocked me with cattle prods. Then they threw water on the ground and poured water on me from above. They added an electric current, and I felt the shock. I felt like I was going to die. They did this three times. Then I told them, “I will confess everything, anything you want.” 

A number of adult detainees and security force members who had defected and who were interviewed by Human Rights Watch confirmed the presence and torture of child detainees in facilities across Syria. “Samih,” a former adult detainee held in a political security facility in Latakia, told Human Rights Watch that children were subjected to worse treatment than adults, including sexual abuse, because they were children.

The government has used schools as detention centres, sniper posts, and military bases or barracks. “Marwan,” from the Insha’at neighborhood in Homs, and other Homs residents told Human Rights Watch that the army attacked Bahithet Al-Badiyah school on Brazil Street on November 4, and that military security forces then turned the school into a detention centre. Local activists also told Human Rights Watch that military security turned Al-Ba’ath elementary school in Joubar, another Homs neighborhood, into a military base and detention center in late December.

Children also told Human Rights Watch that their schools closed in 2011 due to violence, or that it was no longer safe for them to go to school. “Mohammed,” a 10-year-old boy from Homs, said, “I went to school for only one day [this year]. The teachers just gave us the books and told us not to come back. The road to school was not safe because of snipers.”

“Schools across Syria are closed because it’s too dangerous for students to attend, or because the military thinks schools are better used as detention centres than educational establishments,” said Whitman. “How long will Syrian children pay the price for the violence around them?” 

League for Human Rights

The killings took place in Plateau State near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north.

Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group.

Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa. “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”

Mr. Peter said the attacks began around 2 a.m. and lasted around four hours.

One man who was present during the attacks said the killers began firing guns, then poured gasoline on the roofs in Ratt. “We saw the Fulani coming, and they started shooting,” said the man, Yohanna Kudu. “They used machetes to kill our women and children. Some of the children were burned inside the houses.”

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete. “At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.”

Istanbul stands out among threatened cities in developing countries because it is trying to get ahead of the risk. A first step was an earthquake master plan drawn up for the city and the federal government by Dr. Erdik’s team and researchers at three other Turkish universities in 2006. Such a plan is a rarity outside of rich cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles.Carrying out its long list of recommendations has proved more challenging, given that the biggest source of political pressure in Istanbul, as with most crowded cities, is not an impending earthquake but traffic, crime, jobs and other real-time troubles.Nonetheless, with the urgency amplified by the lessons from Haiti’s devastation, Istanbul is doing what it can to gird for its own disaster.

But a push is also coming from the bottom, as nonprofit groups, recognizing the limits of centralized planning, train dozens of teams of volunteers in poor districts and outfit them with radios, crowbars and first-aid kits so they can dig into the wreckage when their neighborhoods are shaken.

Under a program financed with more than $800 million in loans from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and more in the pipeline from other international sources, Turkey is in the early stages of bolstering hundreds of the most vulnerable schools in Istanbul, along with important public buildings and more than 50 hospitals. With about half of the nearly 700 schools assessed as high priorities retrofitted or replaced so far, progress is too slow to suit many Turkish engineers and geologists tracking the threat. But in districts where the work has been done or is under way — those closest to the Marmara Sea and the fault — students, parents and teachers express a sense of relief tempered by the knowledge that renovations only cut the odds of calamity.

“I hope it’s enough,” said Serkan Erdogan, an English teacher at the Bakirkoy Cumhuriyet primary school close to the Marmara coast, where $315,000 was spent to add reinforced walls, jackets of fresh concrete and steel rebar around old columns and to make adjustments as simple as changing classroom doors to open outward, easing evacuations. “The improvements are great, but the building may still collapse,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with that risk. The children need to know what they should do.”In a fifth-grade classroom, the student training that goes with the structural repairs was evident as Nazan Sati, a social worker, asked the 11-year-olds what they would do if an earthquake struck right at that moment. At first a forest of hands shot toward the ceiling. Ms. Sati quickly told them to show, not tell. In a mad, giggling scramble, the students dove beneath their desks. But the threat for children, and their parents, also lies outside the school walls, in mile upon mile of neighborhoods filled with structures called gecekondu, meaning “landed overnight,” because they were constructed seemingly instantly as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural regions flowed into the city seeking work in the past decade or two.

Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said the attacks were committed by Muslim men speaking Hausa and Fulani against Christians, mostly of the Berom ethnicity. Civil society leaders in Jos said that the attacks appeared to be in retaliation for previous attacks against Muslim communities in the area and the theft of cattle from Fulani herdsmen. On January 19, more than 150 Muslim residents were killed in an attack on the nearby town of Kuru Karama.

Witnesses to the killings, community leaders from Jos, and journalists who visited the villages told Human Rights Watch that they saw bodies, including corpses of young children and babies, inside houses, strewn around the streets, and in the pathways leading out of the villages. A Christian leader who participated today in a mass burial of 67 bodies in Dogo Nahawa said that about 375 people are dead or still missing. Journalists and community leaders who visited the town said that many homes, cars, and other property were burned and destroyed.

After the worst of the mid-January violence in and around the nearby town of Kuru Karama, Jonathan pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice. "Those found to have engineered, encouraged or fanned the embers of this crisis through their actions or pronouncements will be arrested and speedily brought to justice," he said. "We will not allow anyone to hide under the canopy of group action to evade justice. Crime, in all its gravity, is an individual responsibility, not a communal affair." While Jonathan's commitments are a step in the right direction, they need to be followed with credible investigations and prosecutions, Human Rights Watch said.

Nigeria is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines. More than 13,500 people have died in religious or ethnic clashes since the end of military rule in 1999. The outbreak of violence south of Jos on March 7 is the latest in a series of deadly incidents in and around Plateau State.

An unprecedented outbreak of violence in Jos claimed as many as 1,000 lives in September 2001; more than 700 people died in May 2004 in inter-communal clashes in the town of Yelwa in the southern part of Plateau State; and at least 700 people were killed in the violence in Jos on November 28 and 29, 2008. Human Rights Watch documented 133 cases of unlawful killings by members of the security forces in responding to the 2008 violence. Sectarian clashes broke out again in Jos on January 17 and quickly spread to neighboring communities, including Kuru Karama.

Human Rights Watch urged the Nigerian government to take concrete steps to end policies that discriminate against "non-indigenes" - people who cannot trace their ancestry to those said to be the original inhabitants of an area - which fuel tension and underlie many of these conflicts. The federal government should pass and enforce legislation prohibiting government discrimination against non-indigenes in all matters that are not purely cultural or related to traditional leadership institutions, Human Rights Watch said.

Officials declared schools open in unaffected areas as of Feb. 1; some students have trickled into those schools, but many have not, say education specialists. Here in the capital, symbols of the devastated education system lie scattered throughout the city. Metal scavengers are still picking through the wrecked Collège du Canapé-Vert, where as many as 300 students studying to become teachers died in the earthquake.

Only about 20 percent of schools were public, with the rest highly expensive for the poor. Even in public schools, poor families struggled to pay for uniforms, textbooks and supplies. While other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean spend about 5 percent of their gross domestic product on education, Haiti was spending just 2 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

“The quality of education was very low, with about a third of teachers having nine years of education at best,” Mr. Cabral said in an interview here, after a recent meeting with Haitian officials in an attempt to come up with a plan to reopen schools. Mr. Cabral said the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that Haiti needed $2 billion over the next five years to rebuild its education system.

Children make up about 45 percent of Haiti’s population

"We are scared," admitted Maria de Jesus Casio, principal of the Ramon Lopez Velarde Elementary School. But she also said teachers don't want to pay. "Teachers don't have much money. The salaries are just enough for survival." Teachers in this city earn an average of $650 a month. Christmas bonuses vary but the average is about a month's pay.

"The educational system is under threat by criminal groups," Javier Gonzalez, the under secretary for education in northern Chihuahua state, said in an interview. "We're just praying to God that there never is an event of this nature."

At the pre-primary school hit by arson Dec. 5, director Norma Pena said her school had been sacked of anything valuable. "They constantly rob from us - the metal bars from the fence, the air conditioners, even the swing sets," Pena said. "The laws are so soft. The laws are no good. When they catch someone, they let them go right away. The criminals threaten the authorities."

"We feel the caring and love people have for our school. This is what keeps us going," Casio said. But the crime gangs are sapping hope. "They respect no one. What is there to rob in this school? And we teachers, with our salaries, have even less."

But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.

In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply — to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.

But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.

He said research had suggested that boys in Jamaica deliberately underperformed in literacy tests because the tests were carried out in standard English, and "to speak in standard English is considered a woman's activity". He went on to suggest the same cultural attitudes affected the learning of African-Caribbean boys in England.

"Boys are more interested in hustling, which is a quick way of making a living, rather than making the commitment to study. This is a supposed to be a street thing which is a male thing. "The influence of this attitude towards masculinity seems to be having a tremendous impact on how well African-Caribbean and Jamaican males do.