Outlook 2000

"Since by definition poor households spend the bulk of their income on food, it is clear that the income provided by working children is critical to their survival," says a 1998 International Labour Organisation (ILO) report, released during the February African Regional Tripartite Meeting On Child Labour in the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

The ILO estimates that the growing army of child laborers in Africa could swell by a million new children every year to more than 100 million by 2015 if social trends persist. "Poverty, undoubtedly makes children’s rights more difficult, but the notion that people are poor so as to justify child labour is wrong," says John Doohan, who is in charge of information at the Geneva-based ILO. A landmark in the struggle to combat child labour was reached last June when the ILO adopted a new international treaty, outlawing extreme forms of child labor. The treaty, which is expected to become law before year’s end, places a ban on extreme working conditions affecting the health and development of children such as slavery, bondage, and factory work.

"We are seeing an enormous change from an attitude that almost guaranteed that child labour would not change," Doohan says. In Africa and Asia more than 90 percent of children working as domestics, one of the most exploitative forms of child labor, are girls.

Studies conducted by the Population Council in Kenya, for example, show that 8- to 14-year-old girls work at domestic chores, for 19 hours a week, boys for 14 hours. In Bangladesh, out-of- school boys spend 12 minutes a day on domestic duties, compared to 5 hours for girls. Studies in India have shown that 9 out of 10 households employing domestics preferred 12- to 15-year-old girls. Similar gender disparities in education have been noted in many schools in developing countries outside Latin America, where boys have higher rates of enrollment and are more likely to remain in school. For example, more than 4 times as many Yemeni boys attend secondary schools as do girls—36 percent to 8 percent. In Nepal, 49 percent of boys reach secondary schools, compared to 25 percent of girls.

Teenage brides may be less common now than a generation ago, but in many countries and for many young girls, it is still a worrying norm. UNICEF data from some 53 countries show that the highest rates of girls married at age 15 and below are in sub-Saharan Africa (25 percent), followed by Asia.

Perhaps the greatest challenges in the 21st century will be armed conflicts and HIV/AIDS which have increased the vulnerability of women and children. Compared with armed conflicts, HIV/AIDS kills far more people, and at the same time has been described as "a silent emergency whose effect threatens to violate all the tenets of the Convention on the Rights of the Child."

The magnitude of the orphan crisis which has so far left 8.2 children without parents is indescribable in most African countries worst hit by the scourge, eroding the hard-won gains of child survival strategies. In Botswana, AIDS will be responsible for 64 percent of deaths of children under 5 by 2000 while in South Africa and Zimbabwe, AIDS is projected to account for a 100 percent increase in child mortality. Studies in Zambia show 68 percent of orphans have dropped out of school and there are an increasing number of child-headed households.

"The challenge to us is how to reverse these invisible challenges of HIV that are making the plight of the child more visible," says Pulkol. "It is taking away teachers, doctors and parents, who are of the very service providers who have obligations to fulfill the rights of children."

Armed conflicts in the last few decades have, on the other hand, more and more targeted civilians, with health workers, teachers, and other service providers often being the first to flee, leaving children vulnerable to malnutrition and diseases.

Reaching the goals the world set for itself in 1990 seems an ambitious plan, when thousands of children continue to work as soldiers in war situations and the unresolved controversial issue of landmines continues to affect a large children population in most war-torn African and Asian countries. Some 300,000 children are estimated to be involved in wars at present, killing and dying for causes they barely understand.

There are also important lessons to be drawn during the next Children’s Summit in 2001, from the genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, where decades of immunization work were devalued as aid workers found themselves burying children they had struggled to vaccinate against early childhood diseases. It will, however, not be an easy task to improve the condition of the child as the new millennium approaches.

As Carol Bellamy, UNICEF’s executive director, said while launching the agency’s 1999 State of the State of the World’s Children Report in July: "Half of the world’s poor are children and more babies are being born into poverty now than ever before." Never in history have we seen such numbers.                      Z