Flagging support from international donors is threatening efforts to return thousands of West African child soldiers to civilian life, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Tuesday.
Unicef said that unless it receives $1,4-million immediately it will be forced to halt an education programme that is helping some 7 000 former fighters in Sierra Leone.
Unicef chief Carol Bellamy said that ending the programme would mean ”breaking the promise of peace for these children”.
Sierra Leone’s child soldiers — the youngest just six years old — left the battlefields when combatants in the country’s savage civil war started turning in their guns in 2001 after almost a decade of conflict.
Released into the care of aid agencies, most spent months at centres designed to ease their way back into civilian life and are now reunited with relatives.
Unicef and other organisations continued to help them readjust after their return home, offering them a chance to catch up with their studies or to learn a trade. Besides the former soldiers, Unicef said the programme facing the axe educates a further 90 000 youngsters.
”Thousands of young minds once engaged by fighting have been re-engaged by training programmes that promise a future,” said Aboubacry Tall, Unicef’s representative in Sierra Leone.
”We are now going to have to close these courses less than halfway through. We will have thousands of youth on the streets — many of whom have toted guns — who have had a taste of success in school and to whom we are handing the bitter pill of failure.”
Unicef said it is concerned that the funding shortfall comes at a time when the use of child soldiers has surged in other African conflicts, including the raging war in Sierra Leone’s neighbour Liberia, and Burundi, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. – Sapa-AP