State of the World's Children

Leaving Our Children Behind

More than half the world's children are suffering the effects of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, denying them a healthy and safe childhood, Unicef's annual report said Thursday.

The United Nations children's fund report on The State of the World's Children found more than one billion children are growing up hungry and unhealthy, schools have become targets for warring parties and whole villages are 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.

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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 that conflict round the world has seriously injured or permanently disabled millions of children, while millions more endure 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 are 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.