A troubled decade for Africa's children

 

Over a decade after world leaders gathered at the 1990 World Summit for Children to set ambitious targets for improvements in child health and welfare, life for tens of millions of Africa's youngest and most vulnerable inhabitants remains difficult, dangerous and, all too often, tragically short. Despite the unprecedented global prosperity of the 1990s, and modest advances for children in some African countries, children in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be ill, less likely to be in school and far more likely to die before the age of five than children in any other region. Trapped in a downward spiral of war, disease and deepening poverty, African children and their parents were, by some measures, worse off at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning.

"African children have the worst life chances in the world," noted the past Organization of African Unity Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim at a Pan-African Forum for Children in May 2001. "And the gap between the survival rates, the education and the development of Africa's children and the children of other continents is increasing." Narrowing that gap will be on the world's agenda again this May, when heads of state and government convene at UN headquarters for the General Assembly Special Session on Children to assess progress towards the goals set at the 1990 summit. The leaders will pledge to build "a world fit for children" in the new millennium, but nowhere will that be more difficult than in Africa.

Lagging behind

The statistics bear grim witness to the plight of African children. During a decade that saw over 100 countries slash mortality rates for children under five by 20 per cent or more (see graph), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports, the rate for Africa declined by just 3 per cent overall, and actually increased in nine African countries. The under-five mortality rate for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, at 175 per thousand in 2000, was more than double the world average of 81 per thousand and nearly 30 times higher than that of children in developed countries.

Statistics for another key indicator of well-being for children and their families, maternal mortality, are equally disturbing. Nearly half of the estimated 515,000 women who die annually from pregnancy or child birth are African. With 1,100 deaths per 100,000 births, African women are nearly three times more likely to die than women in the region with the next highest rates, South Asia. According to a 1995 UN study, one African woman in 13 will die during pregnancy or childbirth. In industrialized countries, the ratio is one in every 4,085.

Chronic malnutrition remains widespread in Africa, and the target of a 50 per cent reduction of malnutrition in children under five is far out of reach. Fully one in three Africans is malnourished and, despite improvements in some countries, the absolute number of hungry children rose during the decade. Statistics on low birth weight reveal that an estimated one in eight African babies -- some 3.1 million infants -- is born underweight each year.