|
|
Back
to Opinions Page
Half of kids suffer war, poverty,
AIDS
CNN on “The State of the World's Children”, December 9, 2004
LONDON, England (AP) -- More than half the world's children are suffering
the effects of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, denying them a healthy and safe
childhood, according to UNICEF's annual report.
The United Nations children's fund report on The State of the World's
Children found more than 1 billion children were growing up hungry and
unhealthy, schools had become targets for warring parties and whole villages
were being killed off by AIDS.
A failure by governments around the world to live up to standards outlined
in 1989's Convention on the Rights of the Child caused permanent damage
to children and blocked progress toward human rights and economic advancement,
the report said.
"Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that
actually hurt childhood," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy
said.
A day before the report's release, an editorial published in The Lancet,
the respected British medical journal, accused Bellamy of neglecting issues
of child survival while emphasizing the rights of children.
"A preoccupation with rights ignores the fact that children will
have no opportunity for development at all unless they survive,"
said the journal's editor, Richard Horton. "Child survival must sit
at the core of UNICEF's advocacy and country work. Currently, and shamefully,
it does not."
UNICEF spokesman Alfred Ironside said Horton ignored progress made on
child survival rates.
"Globally child deaths have fallen by 18 percent since 1990,"
Ironside said in London.
In his foreword to the report, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said
poverty denied children dignity and endangered their lives, conflict robbed
them of a secure family life and HIV/AIDS killed parents, teachers, doctors
and children themselves.
Compiled by UNICEF and researchers at the London School of Economics and
Bristol University, the report found more than half the children in developing
countries lived in poverty without access to basic goods and services.
It also said:
- One in six children was severely hungry.
- One in seven had no access to health care.
- One in five had no safe water.
- One in three had no toilet or sanitation facilities at home.
The report found 640 million children did not have adequate shelter;
300 million had no access to information such as TV, radio or newspapers
and 140 million children, the majority of them girls, had never been to
school.
Poverty was not confined to developing countries, the report said, as
the proportion of children living in low-income households in 11 of 15
industrialized nations rose in the past decade.
More than 10 million child deaths were recorded in 2003, with an estimated
29,158 children under 5 dying from mostly preventable causes everyday.
UNICEF reported conflict around the world had seriously injured or permanently
disabled millions of children, while millions more endured sexual violence,
trauma, hunger and disease caused by wars.
Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in conflict during the 1990s
were children and around 20 million children were forced from their homes
and communities by fighting.
UNICEF said almost half a million children under 15 died of AIDS in 2003,
while another 630,000 children were infected with HIV.
By 2003 some 2.1 million children under 15 were living with HIV/AIDS,
most of whom were infected during pregnancy, birth or through breast-feeding.
From 2001 to 2003, the number of children who had lost one or both parents
to AIDS rose from 11.5 million to 15 million and around 80 percent of
those were living in sub-Saharan Africa.
The UNICEF report said the world had the capacity to reduce poverty, conflict
and HIV/AIDS and improve the plight of the world's children.
It said Millennium Development Goals, which aim to improve the world through
human development by 2015 and were agreed to by the U.N.'s 191 member
states in 2000, could be achieved at an annual cost of $40-$70 billion.
In comparison, world spending on military in 2003 was $956 billion.
Bellamy said the quality of a child's life depended on decisions made
by the global community and the world's governments.
"We must make those decisions wisely and with children's best interests
in mind. If we fail to secure childhood, we fail to reach our larger,
global goals for human rights and economic development," she said.
Back to Opinions
Page
|
