 BY JEROME MWANDA
NAIROBI (IDN) - The UN Millennium Campaign is calling on African states, civil society organisations and the private sector to tackle child and maternal mortality, school dropout, gender inequality in the universal primary education and poor quality standards of that programme.
Some 50,000 African children under the age of five years will be losing their lives as a result of preventable or curable diseases. 38 million children of primary school age in Africa will still remain out of school, says the Campaign that coincides with the Day of the African Child on June 16.
The day is celebrated in memory of thousands of black school children who were maimed and killed in 1976 Soweto uprising, as they took to the streets to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand their right to be taught in their own language.
"Child survival, protection and development are not only universal aspirations enshrined in the MDGs, they are also human rights issues ratified in the International Convention on the Rights of Children and the African charter on the rights and welfare of the child," says the UN Millennium Campaign communications coordinator and acting deputy director for Africa, Sylvia Mwichuli.
"Investing in the health and education of African children and their mothers is a sound economic decision and one of the surest ways for a country to secure its future. Reducing child mortality and ensuring Universal Primary Education, requires strong political commitment," she says.
From Sierra Leone to Ethiopia, Angola to Mozambique, an average of more than one in every four children die before the age of five. In Liberia, Mali, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burkina Faso, the figure is more than one in every five children.
Even in Africa's biggest and most developed countries scores of children die before their fifth birthdays: in Nigeria 191 of every 1,000 children die by the age of five, in Botswana 124 and in Kenya 121 of every one thousand.
To compound the situation further, while official reports indicate that children are now better off than they were ten years ago and can look forward to living beyond the age of five. But the fact is that their mothers still die while giving birth. Consequently they are denied parental care.
"Whether it is the mother or her baby that dies, life shouldn't be lost in avoidable circumstances: no mother wants to produce a child for death to grab nor any baby would wish to grow up an orphan, or come to life at the expense of the mother's life," says the UN Millennium Campaign in a press release.
Although the official UN Millennium Development Goals 2008 report shows that there is widespread progress in primary school enrollment, user fees, such as uniform, stationary and meals, armed conflict, lack of birth registration, child labour and HIV/AIDS still keep around 38 million African children of primary school age out of school. The conditions are more devastating for girls; the higher they climb the ladder of education, the wider the rate of dropout.
With this in view, the UN Millennium Campaign's policy associate Thomas Deve says: "To ensure that more vulnerable and marginalized are enrolled and remain in school, targeted programmes and interventions aimed at poor households such as setting up satellite schools in remote areas, eliminating school fees, providing school meals, constructing separate sanitation facilities, ensuring a safe school environment and promoting later marriage must be designed and implemented across countries that lag behind on these MDG targets."
Time and again, it has been proven that given political commitment, the results are often significant. Countries like Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and Ghana are good cases. Malawi for example has moved from a hungry country that it has always been to a regional food supplier in recent years. It is also only second to Costa Rica globally in reducing child mortality by more than one-third in the past three years, the Campaign's policy associate points out.
It adds: When it seemed impossible for pastoral communities in Kenya to access education, the government designed mobile classrooms in which the nomads' children access education as they wander about in search of water and pasture for their cattle.
In all of these cases the reason for success has been the country’s political will.
The UN Millennium Campaign was established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2002. The Campaign supports citizens’ efforts to hold their governments to account for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
The Goals were adopted by 189 world leaders from the north and south, as part of the Millennium Declaration which was signed in 2000. These leaders agreed to achieve the Goals by 2015. - 16.06.2009
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