Beirut blast: 6 months on, half a million children at risk of child marriage and forced labour
Water Sanitation
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedOver half a million children are at risk of child labour and child marriage as their families struggle six months on from the Beirut blast, World Vision warns today.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 1,630,000 · Deaths: 200
- What help is neededIn Beirut schools are closed, many health facilities are inaccessible, running water is scarce and with lockdown, many people cannot work.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Over half a million children are at risk of child labour and child marriage as their families struggle six months on from the Beirut blast, World Vision warns today. The explosion, which killed more than 200 people on August 4 last year, compounded a crisis in Lebanon which had already been exacerbated by COVID-19. In Beirut schools are closed, many health facilities are inaccessible, running water is scarce and with lockdown, many people cannot work. World Vision estimates that 541,000 children are therefore at risk of early marriage and being forced into labour as parents struggle to put food on the table. The number of children and caregivers reporting mental health concerns is also on the rise, putting children at risk of long-term psychological challenges. Rami Shamma, Operations Director at World Vision Lebanon, says: “Six months ago, families in Beirut who were already struggling to survive COVID-19 and an economic crisis were forced to deal with another catastrophe in the form of a devastating explosion. Six months later they have not recovered. In fact, things are worse for them. We call for international solidarity for the people of Lebanon, they are in no less of a crisis situation now than they were on August 4th,.” World Vision is urging the international community to invest in education and to prioritise child protection and mental health support for those struggling in the aftermath of the blast. Hans Bederski, World Vision Lebanon’s Country Director, says: "The World Vision team in Lebanon is extremely grateful to those who provided immediate support following the explosion, but we ask you to remember that just because they have left the news headlines, it does not mean the people of Beirut no longer need help. “The emergency situation following the explosion may have calmed, however the Lebanese people still struggle to survive numerous ongoing crises. COVID-19 has left parents with no work and their children with no access to education and at risk of forced labour and marriage. It is almost impossible for people in Lebanon to overcome this dire situation on their own. We call on the international community to prioritise the children of Lebanon who are facing an impossible situation. If we do not act now, the protection and well-being of thousands of children will be jeopardised.”
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 2 human-impact figures were separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 1,630,000 retained at 2021-02-04
- Deaths
- 200 retained at 2021-02-04
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 f5ccf916854bea51d5e435d19d5a809f0977485c3a3b6e0e759b1102157d1c21