After more than a decade children’s rights have come under the spotlight
For three days this month heads of state and government leaders, NGOs, children’s advocates and young people themselves put the human rights of children at the top of the international agenda. The United Nations Special Session for Children from May 8 to 10 was the first international meeting in 11 years that was devoted solely to all aspects of children’s lives.
The special session offered a real chance to create a better world for children. It was a unique opportunity to carry out a reality check on what the world is doing to children and to take into account the lessons of the past decade.
The last top-level meeting dedicated to children was the World Summit on Children in September 1990. More than 180 countries took part and signed a final declaration and plan of action. Following the summit, 155 countries drew up national programmes to ensure the survival, protection and development of children.
Since 1990 there have been some successes – more was done for children over the past 10 years than in any other period in history. For example, three million children survived preventable diseases in 2000 that they would have died from in 1990; polio and guinea worm disease – among preventable diseases claiming the lives of 15-million children a year – have almost been eradicated; and while access to clean water has improved, it still evades a third of the world’s children. Today the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – which provides a common legal framework for the care and protection of children – has been ratified by every country in the world, except the United States and Somalia.
But while such measures demonstrate some of the successes of the first summit, day-to-day life for most children remains the same. The gap between the rhetoric and reality is stark. In today’s world 600-million children are in families living on less than $1 a day. Almost 160-million children under five are malnourished. And more than 10-million children still die every year from preventable diseases. An estimated 300000 children – some as young as seven – are fighting in conflicts around the world. And 250-million children under the age of 15 are forced to work to survive, often in exploitative conditions.
These facts are a snapshot of what it is like to be a child in the 21st cen- tury. It is accepted that ill health and poverty go hand in hand, yet health inequalities are growing at a steady rate. International trade agreements, service liberalisation and free mar-kets designed to help poorer countries derive much-needed income have added to children being deprived of basic services.
The World Health Organisation estimates that governments need to spend at least $60 a person in order to provide the most basic health care. But poorer countries – with obstacles such as international debt repayments and restrictions on spending by international donors – can only afford to spend $3 on average a person.
To date only a third of developing countries have reached the summit’s goal to reduce child mortality by a third by the year 2000. Furthermore, HIV and Aids are now a major threat to children’s survival in countries including South Africa, Nepal and Uganda.
Universal access to education – seen as a crucial stepping stone out of poverty – still remains out of reach for more than 130-million children of primary school age. Other barriers to education include school fees, disability, gender and ethnicity. War is an increasingly common feature of children’s lives. For millions of children hatred and violence, killing and fear have become a normal way of life.
At the special session governments were expected to sign up to the Outcome Document – a broad-based declaration of intent, setting targets and monitoring tools for individual countries to use as a framework for drawing up their own plans of action.
However, the key obstacles to fundamental transformation in children’s lives remain the lack of political will, inadequate resourcing and a lack of respect for children’s rights. No new money has been allocated for the plans of action, many developing countries are still prioritising military expenditure over children’s budgets, and developed countries are yet to meet financial commitments to provide overseas aid.
The Save the Children organisation believes that children deserve a better deal. It called on governments to ensure that the special session resulted in real and lasting change for all children. This can only be achieved if governments recognise that poverty, inequality and discrimination are key obstacles to realising children’s rights; and that children must be winners in globalisation, trade liberalisation and free markets.
Today children make up 40% of the world’s population – the largest generation of children at any time in history. It is time for the world leaders to start taking children seriously – if they can’t do it now, they will never be able to do it.