New York - Based on current trends, 69 million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030, the target date for the Sustainable Development Goals.
This is unless the world focuses more on the plight of its most disadvantaged children, according to the State of the World’s Children, Unicef’s (UN Children’s Fund) annual flagship report, which was released on Tuesday.
It paints a stark picture of what is in store for the world’s poorest children if governments, donors, businesses and international organisations do not accelerate efforts to address their needs.
“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures… it imperils the future of their societies,” said Unicef executive director Anthony Lake. “We have a choice: invest in these children now or allow our world to become still more unequal and divided.”
Significant progress has been made in saving children’s lives, getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty, the report notes.
Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, as the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half what it was in the 1990s.
But this progress has been neither even nor fair, the report says. Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, children born to mothers with no education are almost three times more likely to die before they are five than those born to mothers with a secondary education.
Nowhere is the outlook more grim than in sub-Saharan Africa, where at least 247 million children – or two in three – live in multidimensional poverty, deprived of what they need to survive and develop, and where nearly 60 percent of 20 to 24-year-olds from the poorest fifth of the population have had less than four years of schooling.
By 2030, sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of the 60 million children of primary school age who will still be out of school and nine out of 10 children living in extreme poverty.
Although education plays a unique role in levelling the playing field for children, the number of children who do not attend school has increased since 2011, and a significant proportion of those who do go to school are not learning. Almost two in five who do finish primary school have not learnt how to read, write or do simple arithmetic.
The report points to evidence that investing in the most vulnerable children can yield immediate and long-term benefits. Each additional year of education a child receives increases his or her adult earnings by about 10 percent. For each extra year of schooling completed, on average, by young adults in a country, that country’s poverty rates fall by 9 percent.
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