Between 2001 and 2011, Niger’s overall rate of enrolment for girls rose from 29 to 63 percent, according to the Ministry of Education. Credit: Alessandro Vannucci/CC BY 2.0

A decade ago, less than a third of school-aged girls in Niger were in class. Today, though significant cultural and religious opposition remains, nearly two-thirds of girls are enrolled in school.

“Back in 2003, we had only 15 girls at my school, out of 150 students. Now, we have 103 girls out of a total of 175 students,” said Ibrahim Sani, who has taught for 17 years in the town of Agadez, in the northern part of this West African country.

This story is repeated in other parts of the country. Salouhou Adou teaches in a village on the outskirts of Tahoua, the capital of the central region with the same name: “When I came to Kollama in 2003, there were only 29 girls out of 113 students. Today, the number of girls has tripled, to 87 out of 137 students,” he told IPS.

The rate of enrolment for girls in Tahoua has more than doubled, from 21 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2011, according to the regional directorate for primary education.

Between 2001 and 2011, Niger’s overall rate of enrolment for girls rose from 29 to 63 percent, according to the Ministry of Education.

Concerted effort

The dramatic improvement is thanks to the combined efforts of administrative and traditional authorities, teachers, parents and civil society to raise popular awareness of the importance of giving girls an education.

“Our intervention has meant the gender imbalance in terms of school registration in our area has been reduced,” said Hadiza Moussa, a teacher in Téssaoua, in the south of the country where official statistics also show the enrolment of girls rising: girls made up 45 percent of students in 2012, compared to just 21 percent in 2001.

Weddings and baptism ceremonies are two occasions often used by campaigners to raise awareness of girls’ education. But some ordinary citizens have taken up the cause on their own.

“I have gone door to door to talk to families who were against education for their daughters,” Maman Zakari, a trader in his sixties in the town of Maradi, in the south of the country, told IPS. “I myself was against enrolling girls in school in the past. But I came to understand the importance of education for girls through public awareness campaigns and radio programmes.” He has enrolled two of his five daughters.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is also supporting various incentives.

“Teachers in rural areas who take part in these campaigns get some material support from UNICEF, in addition to their salaries,” Kadri Yacouba, director of primary schools in Maradi, told IPS. “And women who send their daughters to school get money to start small businesses.”

Despite the growth in enrolment of girls, there is still a large gap in school attendance between girls and boys. Between 2001 and 2011, enrolment for boys rose from 36 to 86 percent.

This gap is explained by the fact that in rural areas, many families don’t send their girls to school because of social and cultural beliefs.

“There are many parents who think that school is a destabilising factor for girls. For them, a girl’s destiny is to become a good wife to her husband and a good mother for her children,” retired school inspector Aboubabcar Amadou told IPS.

In both urban and rural areas, parents frequently withdraw their daughters from school to marry them off. “Even in families where the girls go to school, parents are more interested in boys’ education. Fetching water, doing laundry and cooking are still the daily lot of young girls,” said Nana Hadiza, a member of a cluster of civil society organisations working for universal access to education.

Setbacks

The campaign faced a setback in November 2012, when a draft law intended to keep young girls in school ran into strong opposition from the ulamas – Muslim clerics – and associations of Muslim women. These groups put pressure on legislators not to pass the law, instead sending it back for review.

The bone of contention was Article 14 of the draft law which stipulated that anyone agreeing to the marriage of a young girl in school without prior approval from a judge, would be liable to a prison sentence of between six months and two years, a fine of 500,000 to 1,000,000 CFA francs (between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars), or both.

According to the Muslim associations, this is not acceptable in a country like Niger where around 99 percent of the population is Muslim.

“Islam grants parents all rights and authority over their children. A father does not need a judge’s permission to give away his daughter in marriage,” said Malam Abdou Garba, a preacher in Niamey, the Nigerien capital.

“The draft law needs to be modified, to remove everything that is not in line with Islam. These articles could lead young girls to insubordination and disobedience towards their parents, and it could also lead many parents to refuse to enrol their daughters in school,” Mamane Sani, from the Nigerien Association for the Defence of Human Rights, told IPS.

But Hadiza Saley, from the “We Can” campaign (a movement of women’s associations in Niger which fights violence and discrimination against women), called for even more far-reaching legislation. “We must go beyond thinking about girls in school here, to include all girls. In its present form, the draft law discriminates against young girls who are not in school.”

“Vaccines have saved as many lives as clean water. Risking not giving shots is like playing Russian roulette,” Dr. Carlota Russ, secretary of the Argentine Paediatric Society’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, told IPS.

Russ said that in industrialised countries, immunisation coverage is in decline as the culture of vaccination weakens, creating a risk of re-emergence of diseases that have already been controlled, like measles.

“Fortunately, in Argentina, the anti-vaccine movement is not strong,” she said.

Vaccines are obligatory in Argentina. Credit: Alviseni/CC BY 2.0

However, when a case of refusal to vaccinate reaches the courts, the story has a great impact in the media and produces a wave of uncertainty that reaches even clinics and doctors’ offices, she said.

Well-informed, well-educated parents with small children are drawn in by theories alleging adverse effects from the inoculation of viruses, bacteria or toxic substances.

In 2012, the case of a couple who refused to vaccinate their child reached the Supreme Court, which ordered that the mandatory state immunisation plan be administered, “by force” if necessary, “for the greater good of the child and of public health.”

In an interview with IPS, paediatrician Eduardo Yahbes, of the Argentine Homeopathic Medical Association, said the family “had a poor legal defence,” and endorsed their right to refuse to have their child immunised.

Yahbes is one of the health professionals who contribute to the web site “Libre Vacunación” (Vaccination Freedom), which says that the idea that immunisation is safe and effective, or that it is the only means of preventing diseases, is a myth.

“Vaccines are not effective; the idea that infectious diseases have disappeared thanks to vaccines is a fraud,” said the paediatrician, a practitioner of alternative medicine.

Yahbes quoted a number of research studies that purportedly show the adverse effects of vaccines, and blamed “the hegemony of the dominant medical system that violates people’s human rights” by forcing them to receive medical treatments they do not want.

In Argentina the mandatory vaccination schedule included four vaccines in 1970, and now includes 16. According to the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), it is one of the most comprehensive protocols on the continent.

In addition to traditional vaccines like BCG (against tuberculosis) or the Sabin anti-polio vaccine, new ones, for example for preventing infection with human papilloma virus, which can cause cervical cancer, have been added in recent years.

Russ said vaccines are “essential to reduce the chances of contracting illnesses and their complications; they are mandatory because the burden of the illness justifies protection.”

She pointed to the re-emergence in Europe and the United States of cases of measles, while in Latin America there are only a few cases imported from other regions of the world.

“We are covered, but we must not lower our guard,” she said.

Russ acknowledged that “there are occasional adverse side effects, as with any medication. But they are so minimal that the use of vaccines is amply justified.”

She referred to the alleged link between autism and vaccines, reported by Yahbes in a 2011 article in the publication Homeopatía para Todos, of the Argentine Homeopathic Medical Association. Yahbes wrote that “vaccinations are regarded as a major factor in the development of this pathology (autism).”

Russ said the theory, which created a scare that was “disastrously harmful,” “was later shown to be untrue.” In 2010, the British scientific journal The Lancet, at the request of the General Medical Council (GMC) of the United Kingdom, retracted a paper by researcher Andrew Wakefield on the presumed link between the two, published in 1998.

Wakefield had postulated a link between the triple viral vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), autism and gastrointestinal symptoms. After investigating, the GMC ruled that the scientist had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in his research and banned him from practising medicine.

However, the rumours and scares proliferated, and won new converts in the field of alternative medicine. As a result, measles vaccination coverage in developed countries has fallen, leading to the re-emergence of diseases like measles and whooping cough.
In Argentina, the official schedule of vaccinations is legally binding and free of charge. Since 2009 immunisations have been a requirement for receiving the universal child allowance, a direct cash transfer to families with children.

The allowance is paid to families with parents who are unemployed or who work in the informal economy, with children under 18, or disabled dependants of any age, in exchange for regular school attendance, health checks and certified vaccinations.

One of the millions of children in Somalia in need of food aid in 2011. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

Almost 260,000 people, half of them young children, died of hunger during the last famine in Somalia, according to a U.N. report that admits the world body should have done more to prevent the tragedy.

The toll is much higher than was feared at the time of the 2010-2012 food crisis in the troubled Horn of Africa country and also exceeds the 220,000 who starved to death in a 1992 famine, according to the findings.

“The report confirms we should have done more before the famine was declared,” said Philippe Lazzarini, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia.

“Warnings that began as far back as the drought in 2010 did not trigger sufficient early action,” he said in a statement.

Half of those who died were children under five, according to the joint report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

“Famine and severe food insecurity in Somalia claimed the lives of about 258,000 people between October 2010 and April 2012, including 133,000 children under five,” said the report, the first scientific estimate of how many people died.

Toll in children’s lives

Somalia was the country hardest hit by extreme drought in 2011 that affected over 13 million people across the Horn of Africa.

“An estimated 4.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of children under five died in southern and central Somalia,” the report said, stating that the deaths were on top of 290,000 “baseline” deaths during the period, and double the average for sub-Saharan Africa.

Lazzarini said that about 2.7 million people are still in need of life-saving assistance and support to rebuild their livelihoods.

Famine was first declared in July 2011 in Somalia’s Southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions, but later spread to other areas, including Middle Shabelle, Afgoye and inside camps for displaced people in the war-ravaged capital Mogadishu.

In Lower Shabelle 18 percent of children under five died, the report said.

During the famine, it was feared that tens of thousands had died, whereas the report now shows more people died than in Somalia’s 1992 famine, when an estimated 220,000 people died in just over a year.

Famine implies that at least a fifth of households face extreme food shortages, with acute malnutrition faced by more than 30 percent of people, and two deaths per 10,000 people every day, according to the U.N. definition.

Mark Smulders, a FAO senior economist and one of the authors of the report, said the area had suffered one of the worst droughts in over 50 years in the whole of Africa.

“Livestock were dying,” he told Al Jazeera. “People simply did not have access to food, and purchasing power went down.”

Somalia, ravaged by nearly uninterrupted civil war for the past two decades, is one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers and one of the regions that needs them most.

However, security has slowly improved in recent months, with fighters linked to Al Qaeda on the back foot despite launching a deadly bombing campaign.

At the time, most of the famine-hit areas were under their control, and the crisis was exacerbated by their ban on most foreign aid agencies.

‘Catastrophic political failures’

The aid agency Oxfam said the “deaths could and should have been prevented”.

“Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures,” Oxfam’s Somalia director Senait Gebregziabher said in a statement.

“The world was too slow to respond to stark warnings of drought, exacerbated by conflict in Somalia, and people paid with their lives.”

More than a million Somalis are refugees in surrounding nations, and another million are displaced inside the country.

Next Tuesday, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and British Prime Minister David Cameron will co-host a conference in London to discuss how the international community can support Somalia’s progress.

More than 50 countries and organisations are due to take part.

Oxfam said leaders should “ensure that this was Somalia’s last famine” by helping generate jobs and “ensuring trained, accountable security forces”.

The U.N. declared the famine over in February 2012.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

South Africa is leading in the scaling up of Kangaroo Mother Care, a lifesaving intervention that mothers can easily practice. Pictured here are Charlene Paul and her baby in front of their house, next to Athlone Training Stadium in Cape Town. Credit: Ann Hellman/IPS

A young mother – who only wants to be identified as Karren – beamed as she nursed her newborn baby at the University of Witwatersrand’s Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, in Hillbrow, South Africa. 

It is her first pregnancy and Karren had to learn, from a qualified nurse, how to hold and care for her baby.

While Karren will soon be counting her baby’s happy milestones – first smile, first tooth, first step – each year three million children die within their first month of life from largely preventable causes such as prematurity, birth complications and infection, according to international charity Save the Children.

It is a major reason why, at the end of the year, South Africa will launch Global Newborn Action Plan, which aims to reduce the number of newborn deaths here.

But South Africa is leading in the scaling up of Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), a lifesaving intervention that mothers can easily practice, according to Dr. Gary Darmstadt, director of family health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“This was a paradigm-changing idea just a few years ago. No longer could we ignore the newborn period – excuses were gone. We now know of a number of simple interventions that have great potential to avert the top causes of neonatal death,” Darmastadt told IPS.

Kangaroo Mother Care is the act of holding a newborn with skin-to-skin contact. It usually facilitates breastfeeding, reduces the risk of serious infections and keeps the baby warm, thus reducing mortality of preterm infants by about half.

But these are some of the things that first-time mother Karren had to be taught. Studies estimate that if KMC was used widely with preterm babies, it could save more than 1,500 lives around the world each day.

Another critical intervention is the use of antenatal corticosteroids to help develop a preterm baby’s lungs so that he can breathe on his own. It is widely used in high-income countries with an estimated 90 percent coverage of indicated cases of women in preterm labour. If its use spreads in middle and low-income countries, it can save more than 1,000 newborn lives across the globe daily.

Darmstadt said that despite remarkable changes in the levels of understanding of newborn mortality and prevention methods, newborns continue to die and now account for more than 40 percent of all under five deaths.

“The number of newborns who die in sub-Saharan Africa has actually gone up in recent years, even while child and maternal deaths have fallen.”

In fact, an increase in preventing mother-to-child transmission and in paediatric HIV care and treatment services has made significant inroads in reducing under five mortality in South Africa.

But progress is hampered by weak health systems in heavily-affected countries, according to Dr. Lee Fairlie, a paediatrician at the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (WRHI).

“HIV prevention has received increased attention. Child mortality has also benefited from progress in addressing HIV. However, more attention to postnatal feeding support is needed,” Fairlie said.

She also noted that there was a reduction in colliding epidemics such as HIV and tuberculosis; chronic illness and mental health; injury and violence; and maternal, neonatal, and child health. She also added that there was a 3.5 percent reduction in the mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

South Africa now has the world’s largest programme of antiretroviral therapy, and some advances have been made with the implementation of new TB diagnostics, and treatment scale-up and integration.

Dr. Vivian Black of the WRHI told IPS that the country’s health system still faces many challenges, including a shortage of health staff and an ineffective data collection system by health officials that could result in deaths going unrecorded. She pointed out that South Africa’s health authorities were negligent in failing to collect appropriately detailed information about maternal mortality that could guide policy.

“Some of the women don’t know their rights as patients. We have to encourage women to know their rights,” said Black.

But what can South Africa learn from other Sub-Saharan Africa countries?

Koki Agarwal, director of the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP), a programme funded by the United States Agency for International Development, told IPS that South Africa can learn from the successes of other countries like Rwanda and Malawi in terms of reducing infant mortality. These countries have also introduced community health workers who monitor pregnant women and collect data on pre- and post-neonatal deaths.

South Africa needs to accelerate progress in newborn survival by galvanising efforts to mobilise governments, donors, local partners and communities to make newborn deaths a top priority.

Darmstadt concurred. He said Malawi’s health delivery system had the support of President Joyce Banda, who has “done a lot in providing primary health care as well as supporting KMC.”

Rwanda has also had great success in reducing maternal and child deaths. Because of a programme that encourages Rwandan women to seek antenatal care with skilled health practitioners and interventions like KMC, Rwanda is on track to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce child mortality and improve maternal health.

There are eight MDGs, which were adopted by all U.N. member states in 2000 in order to curb poverty, disease and gender inequality.

Agarwal, an internationally renowned expert in safe motherhood and reproductive health who is also vice president of Jhiego, an affiliate of John Hopkins University, said nutrition interventions helped improve the chances of newborn survival.

“A woman’s nutritional status before and during pregnancy helps to define her own health, nutritional status and the survival of her baby at birth and beyond,” she said. “We know that encouraging women to come into care early in their pregnancy, ensuring they know their HIV status, and having them linked to appropriate interventions is the first step in eliminating mother-to-child transmission.”

Agarwal added that in Kenya, MCHIP was working to “guide mobilisation of community health workers in bringing pregnant women – and later their infants – into care.”

Children have been adopting their parents’careers in defence and policing for fear of losing the benefits enjoyed by soldiers and policemen in the DRC, particularly health care and accommodation in the army barracks.

“My father was a policeman and when he died they wanted to evict us from the house at the camp, but we had nowhere to go. We had to find a way to keep the family together, so I decided to become a policeman to help provide for my family,” said Pistchen Kalala, who became a policeman at the age of 20.

“Otherwise we would have been homeless and without health care,” he told IPS.

Congolese soldiers’ income of around 80 dollars a month is very low, and few of them can afford to own even a small home.

Following the death of his father, and his mother’s remarriage to another solider, Dibwa Ntambwe, aged 24, joined the army. He decided to become a soldier so that his brothers and sisters could continue to have access to the benefits accruing to his late father.

Around three quarters of Congolese soldiers are army children, according to Augustin Lukubashi, the chairperson of local NGO Integrated Development Association for Police and Army Children. He is also the child of a deceased soldier.

Lukubashi’s estimates are based on information from the policy and army communication departments in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

“Often, when a military parent dies, the children receive their monthly salary, which encourages them to follow the same career,” Lukubashi told IPS, adding that it was policy for children to receive their deceased fathers’ salaries, sometimes for up to two years after his death.

He added that “living in a military family means living a military life where you grow up in hardship. Army children are well prepared for life in the military.”

Sometimes, against their better judgement, army widows encourage their sons to join the army or police at 18 in order to protect their families.

“When my husband died, they wanted to throw us out of the house we lived in because when a soldier dies, there is a tendency to forget his family,” said Sifa Nyota, an army widow in Goma.

“To continue to receive benefits—health care and accommodation—we decided that our oldest son should take his father’s place (and join the army). That’s how he became a soldier,” she explained to IPS.

Human rights NGOs in North Kivu have protested that this is a violation of the rights of the child, as many of these children have no choice but to become soldiers just like their late fathers. NGOs say that the government should assist these children to further their studies and to embrace other careers.

“The situation these children find themselves in is unacceptable. They should be taken care of by the Congolese government, who should take responsibility for their basic needs and safety,” Duffina Tabu, the chair of the Volunteers Association of Congo, a local NGO, told IPS.

Similarly, Flavien Ciza, a member of the provincial coordinating group of civil society organizations, told IPS that “the precarious living conditions, poverty and unemployment experienced by these children, and their neglect by the government, is at the root of this social trend.”

According to a study in 2011 on poverty in the DRC, “70 percent of households live below the poverty line of less than a dollar a day.”

“The Congolese government should think about educating these children and provide them with a minimum income so that their futures are safe,” Ciza said.

Tabu said the current situation has negative consequences for the army. “This phenomenon weakens the Congolese army, which is sending untrained and inexperienced men into the field. The youth stay in the army out of desperation or to take revenge, rather than out of personal conviction.”

Lukubashi wants the government to pay for the education of all army children. “The unemployment rate and lack of support for these children is the reason for this forced inheritance.”

Two Tuareg girls are playing at Goudebo Refugee Camp in Burkina Faso. In the refugee camps, many Malian children have already missed crucial weeks and months of schooling. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

Malian widow Mariama Sow, 30, and her three children are trying to find some semblance of normalcy in their lives in Dakar, Senegal, since they left the historic city of Timbuktu in northern Mali last June to escape the Islamist occupation.

Sow and her children are now living in relative safety with her eldest sister in this West African nation, as she helps her sibling run her two tangana (informal township restaurants).

“The (Islamist) occupation was not good at all, it affected many lives and will continue to haunt many of us for years to come,” Sow tells IPS, refusing to explain further, except to say it was “hell”.

“Though I’ll never forget what happened, I decided to get over it and focus on the future of my three children who are now eating well thanks to my elder sister’s support,” she says emotionally, adding that the imposition of Sharia Law in northern Mali affected not only women, but everybody in the occupied territories.

As she speaks, a group of men who work at a nearby construction site each wait their turn to be served with a plate of tchep (fried rice and fish).

But Sow is still concerned about the future of her eldest child. Her eight-year-old son has not attended school since armed Islamist groups allied with Al-Qaeda occupied northern Mali back in April 2012. Her daughters, aged four and two, are yet to attend school.

“My son’s first year at school was disrupted by the occupation. It’s now a dilemma because he has not been attending school since, and next year he will be nine. And I’m not sure when real peace will return to Mali so that he can go back to school again,” she says.

While a French-led international intervention in January – requested by Mali’s interim president Dioncounda Traore – eventually pushed the Islamist fighters out of the north, real peace in the West African nation seems a long way off. Defeated Jihadists have now resorted to suicide bombings and other guerrilla attacks.

A report, “Mali in the Aftermath of the French Military Operation”, released in late February by the South African-based Institute for Security Studies, called for the north to be quickly stabilised and secured now that it has been liberated.

“In order to consolidate the military gains achieved and given France’s expressed desire to scale down its presence or, at least, to ‘multilateralise’ its commitment, the idea now is to deploy a United Nations operation that will take over from AFISMA (African-led International Mission in Mali),” the report, authored by Lori Anne Théroux-Bénoni, states.

The war in northern Mali has driven thousands of men, women and children away from their homes. To date, there are 167,370 Malian refugees scattered in five countries in West Africa, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says.

Mauritania has the highest number, 68,385 refugees, followed by 50,000 refugees in Niger, and 48,939 in Burkina Faso. There are 26 and 20 refugees in Guinea and Togo, respectively.

Awo Dede Cromwell, reporting officer for the situation in Mali at the UNHCR’s regional office for West Africa, tells IPS that there are 31 Malian asylum seekers in Senegal whose status has yet to be examined by the National Commission of Eligibility at the Interior Ministry. “They are seven females and 24 males. There are three children among the 31 asylum seekers,” Cromwell explains.

Sow, however, is one of a number of refugees in Senegal who have not registered with the UNHCR, as she was lucky to be taken in by a relative. Many Malians are not so lucky, as they have been forced to live in refugee camps in Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

But the situation her son faces with his schooling is the same as that of other Malian refugee children.

“In the refugee camps, many Malian children have already missed crucial weeks and months of schooling. If they don’t get access to education quickly, they may even miss the entire school year and be at risk of dropping out of school when returning to Mali,” Laurent Duvillier, regional communication specialist at U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) West and Central Africa, explains to IPS.

“The future of these Malian schoolchildren shouldn’t be jeopardised because they are refugees. How can Mali rebuild after the conflict if thousands of its children are deprived from access to education?” he asks.

Duvillier says children who fled violence in Mali have been through a lot of suffering and that getting access to education also means getting back to a “normal life” – playing with other children, learning and smiling.

He says parents who are refugees have little time to look after their children. “If children are left alone, they can easily be at risk of all kinds of abuse and violence. It’s a great relief for parents if they know there is a safe place where their children can learn and play without being in danger.”

Duvillier says that together with the UNHCR, UNICEF is working to train volunteer teachers, distribute school supplies to refugee and displaced children from Mali, and set up tents where teaching can take place in Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali.

“But unfortunately, many Malian refugee children still have no access to education. We need more children in temporary learning spaces, we need more trained and equipped teachers, we need to make sure that what refugee children learn in the camps can be of great use once they go back to Mali.

“More resources are needed as requirements for education needs remain largely underfunded to date,” he concludes.

Hard times have hit Zimbabweans and forced disadvantaged children to earn a living as vendors in downtown Harare. This 16-year-old boy sells sweets and popcorn to earn a living. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

Susan Sithole* is 14 and should be in grade nine or Form Two, according to Zimbabwe’s education system, learning her lessons in Mathematics, English and other subjects.

But instead, you can find her at the corner of Leopold Takawira Avenue and Robert Mugabe Street in downtown Harare, selling cigarettes, sweets and cellphone recharge cards, learning the harsh lessons of commerce and survival.

Sithole, who lives in Harare’s Machipisa low-income suburb, told IPS that the 25 dollars she earns weekly is not enough to pay for her upkeep and still have enough left over to send back to her poor parents in Chipinge, a district over 500 kilometres east of Harare.

“My parents posted me to relatives here to find something to do after they failed to raise school fees for me,” Sithole told IPS. So instead of continuing in school to grade nine, she was forced to drop out in the middle of grade four and come to Zimbabwe’s capital city.

Even if she could afford to return to school, she said that at her age she feels shy to return to her studies in a class of children who will be at least five years younger than her.

According to statistics released in January by the Coalition Against Corruption, Sithole is only one of about 63,000 children under the age of 15 nationwide who are forced to work at vendors, mostly in Zimbabwe’s border towns. This was a marked increase from the 42,000 child vendors reported in 2010 in this country of nearly 13 million people.

Some say that the Zimbabwean government’s ban of non-governmental organisations last February may have increased the number of child vendors in this southern African nation as many of these organisations once paid the school fees of disadvantaged children here, especially those in rural areas.

“The government banned local NGOs here that used to pay school fees for disadvantaged children, as they suspected that the organisations harboured political motives. It left many children with no option except to turn to vending,” an official at the government’s Manicaland Provincial Social Welfare Offices in Mutare, the country’s third-largest city, told IPS.

President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front banned 29 organisations in April 2012, claiming that they had been working towards regime change.

Officials from the National Association of Non-governmental Organisations (NANGO), who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told IPS that since the NGO ban, disadvantaged school children have been unable to pay their school fees of between 30 to 35 dollars per term for primary school.

Over 850,000 underprivileged school children had been supported by NGOs prior to their banning last year, NANGO officials told IPS.

And 30 dollars is considered a huge sum in a country where, according to figures from a 2010 United Nations Children Fund report titled “Child-Sensitive Social Protection in Zimbabwe”, almost half of the population lives below the country’s poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day. In addition, the unemployment rate was 94 percent in 2009, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. A great majority now work in the informal sector.

“The situation is really pathetic for the children we used to support,” an official from Action Aid International Zimbabwe told IPS on the condition of anonymity. “Right now, as I speak to you, our organisation has received reports that over 10,000 pupils have since dropped out of school after failing to pay their school fess. It is a situation bound to plunge poor pupils further into destitution.”

Social worker Givemore Zinyoro told IPS that children selling goods and wares by the side of the road amounted to child labour and accused the government of being lax in addressing rising cases in the country.

“When children venture into vending, that certainly amounts to child labour, which by international statutes is unlawful,” Zinyoro stressed.

Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of the Council of Social Workers in Zimbabwe, said the increase in the number of children selling goods to earn a living pointed to a deepening economic and social crisis.

“It is a reflection of the current state of society, where our country continues to fall deeper into economic and social crisis. More than 84 percent of the population is jobless – it is not only about child vendors.

“Most families are finding it hard to put food on the table and everybody, including underage children, wakes up every morning to eke out a living doing something,” Bohwasi told IPS.

Zimbabwe is still recovering from an economic crisis. Between 2003 and 2009, the country had one of the worst rates of hyperinflation in the world – its year on year inflation was reported as 231 percent. Prices of goods doubled here everyday and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was forced to issue a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note.

A top government official with the Ministry of Labour and Social Services, who asked for anonymity, told IPS that the government was not able to combat the crisis facing poor children in this country.

Economist John Robertson, from Robertson Economic Information Services, pointed out that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis had weakened the government’s capacity to combat child labour.

“Without money to finance vital programmes in labour sectors, the government is living from hand-to-mouth amid donor fatigue. There is a need to revive the economy before addressing issues of child labour,” Robertson told IPS.

*Name changed to protect identity of minor.

Children selling their wares in Gaza. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

In most countries, children are treated more gently by law enforcement than adults, with the right to have a parent present during questioning, for example. The situation is different in the Occupied Territories.

“The common experience of many children is being aggressively awakened in the middle of the night by many armed soldiers and being forcibly brought to an interrogation centre, tied and blindfolded, sleep deprived and in a state of extreme fear,” according to a recent UNICEF report on the Israeli detention of Palestinian children.

Israeli law enforcement officials have arrested approximately 700 Palestinian boys every year for the past 10 years, demonstrating patterns of ill-treatment that UNICEF calls “widespread, systematic and institutionalised”.

The majority of these boys are accused of the same crime – throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or their vehicles.

For the past several years, human rights organisations, U.N. experts, and both Palestinian and Israeli lawyers have made numerous attempts to bring attention to this issue as a clear violation of international human rights law.

In March, UNICEF released a report entitled “Children in Israeli Military Detention”, which outlines Israel’s violations from arrest to detention to interrogation to trial.

It makes specific reference to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Geneva Convention regarding the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, all of which Israel has ratified.

In an interview with IPS, Permanent Observer of Palestine Ambassador Riyad Mansour praised UNICEF’s work in “defending the rights of children, regardless of where they are”, and said he hopes, in the case of Palestinian children, that as more people become aware of the situation, more powerful voices will demand action from Israel.

International law demands that “all countries who are party to these conventions hold Israel responsible for violating any of the provisions,” said Mansour.

According to the CRC, arrest and detention of children, and their overall exposure to criminal proceedings, should always be the measure of last resort and should be minimised as much as possible.

If arrest is deemed necessary, the child under arrest and their parents or guardians must be informed immediately of the reasons; the child should only be physically restrained if they become a physical threat to themselves or others.

During interrogation, the child has a right to legal representation, the presence of a family member, and the right to refrain from self-incrimination.

Interrogators are forbidden from obtaining statements through any form of physical compulsion or verbal intimidation; illegally obtained statements are invalid in court proceedings.

Finally, children must be brought before a judge within 24 hours.

Israeli military detention of Palestinian children deviates quite radically from this model.

Situation in Israel

According to the UNICEF report, soldiers often apprehend children from their homes late at night in a violent manner, damaging property, offering no explanation as to what the charges are or where the child is being taken, and making threats of physical violence and further consequences should the family protest.

Children generally find themselves in the interrogation room within a day of arrest.

Of the cases examined by UNICEF, no child was accompanied by the requisite lawyer and family member; most did not see a lawyer until the day of their trial.

As of this month, the law will require that children under 14 be brought before a judge within 24 hours (reduced from four days), but those under 18 can still be held for 48 hours; furthermore, the judge may delay trial for 30 days at a time, up to 188 days.

Almost all children confess to their alleged crimes, which is no surprise considering the interrogation techniques reportedly employed by Israeli officials – harsh restraint, physical abuse, verbal intimidation, solitary confinement, and threats of worse abuse and even death against both the child and their family members.

Overwhelmingly, confessional documents – often in Hebrew – are the primary evidence for convictions.

Children and their lawyers tend not to object to forced confessions for fear of provoking harsher punishments.

On average, sentences range from two weeks to 10 months.

Technically, children aged 14 and older can receive the maximum sentences for crimes – 10 years for throwing an object at a person and 20 for throwing it at moving vehicle.

Enforcing military law

According to Catherine Weibel, UNICEF’s chief of communication in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli officials who worked with UNICEF on the report “generally acknowledged that there were problems, but tended to minimise their scope.”

In a correspondence with IPS, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Yigal Palmor identified what Israel believes to be major sources of the conflict.

While no internationally recognised state sovereignty exists in the territories, Israel, as an occupying power, can only enforce military law.

“Obviously, military law does not provide the same rights and safeguards as civil law,” said Palmor, “for adults and minors alike.”

The “main reason”, Palmor says, is that potentially threatening Palestinian activist groups “use minors to stir violence and confront security forces, to make propaganda gains”.

Moving forward

UNICEF’s report includes a series of recommendations, which it intends to implement with Israel’s cooperation.

According to Palmor, “The recommendations are the fruit of our joint work and we will work with UNICEF to implement those recommendations.”

Ambassador Mansour has his doubts.

“We don’t believe that the Israeli occupying authority is putting any serious effort to stop these blatant violations of international human rights law,” he told IPS, however, he believes that reports like UNICEF’s “play a role in maximising pressure on the violators of the law”.

Malian children in the Abala refugee camp in Niger. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

One of Amina Diallo’s sons, 14-year-old Salif, has been missing since August last year. She thinks Islamists kidnapped him while he was on his way to the market in their hometown of Gao, in northern Mali, and recruited him as a child soldier.

“Wherever he is, he must know that I still pray for him to come back alive and well,” she tells IPS.

While a French intervention allowed the Malian army to reclaim the north of the country in January – it had been held for more than a year by Islamist militants composed of Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, Ansar Dine and the Movement of Unity and Jihad in West Africa – this West African nation still remains in turmoil with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, missing and abducted children and food shortages.

Diallo and her four other children now live at a relative’s home in Bamako after they left Gao last October. But despite Diallo’s hopes that Salif might return, chances are unlikely.

She tried to search for her missing son, only to be told by local authorities that they were sorry for her loss, and that the Malian army was doing its best to find out where the children were taken.

Media relations director of Christian relief agency World Vision, Laura Blank, tells IPS that children in Mali still remain at risk.

“Unsupervised children are also vulnerable to sexual harassment and violence, including the potential to be recruited as child soldiers by armed groups. This continues to be a concern for World Vision.”

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published in February found that children as young as 11 were placed on the Islamist rebel frontline. Shocked residents told HRW researchers that they saw bodies of child soldiers lying in pools of blood after the fighting. The United Nations Children’s Fund reported at least 175 children were used as soldiers in the conflict last year.

Blank says that her organisation is working with volunteers to share valuable child-protection messages with local communities, which will hopefully empower parents to keep their children safe.

“Children and their families remain vulnerable. They have increasingly limited access to food, water, medicines, and safe shelter, and are prone to diseases,” Blank adds.

Not all children are reported to have taken part in active combat. Some were also used as porters, cooks and spies. Others were offered as sexual slaves to combatants.

Oumou Camara was forced to watch as heavily-armed gunmen, who conducted door-to-door operations in their area in Gao, snatched her 16-year-old daughter from her. They were looking for underage girls, widows and other unmarried women to “marry off” to the mujahidin (combatants of religion).

“They took my daughter away at gunpoint and threatened to shoot us if anyone in the house objected,” the mother of seven tells IPS. “I never saw her again.”

Camara has given up all hope of ever finding her daughter and has no faith in the authorities. “What can the authorities do if they couldn’t even fight their own war? I’m powerless and can only hope and pray.”

Getting comment from the Malian government is impossible. The state has barred independent reporters from entering the war zone, and threatened to detain and prosecute anyone who publishes “sensitive information” that could incite mutiny under the current state of emergency.

But as rights groups try to protect Mali’s vulnerable children, they are also concerned about the growing food crisis in the country.

Oxfam International says that food prices have rocketed, aggravated by a shortage of cereals on the market. Rice has gone up by more than 50 percent since October last year.

“Many traders in Gao region have moved and/or sold out their remaining stocks from Gao to villages and communes outside of the town,” Oxfam International campaign manager in Mali, Ilaria Allegrozzi, tells IPS.

Also, the population has very little cash available as banking systems were disrupted by the conflict.

“Most people in the Gao region don’t have any money left, are in debt, and have sold assets – exhausting their coping strategies,” she says.

Allegrozzi says Oxfam International aims to provide food aid to at least 70,000 people. And Blank says that as of December, World Vision reached nearly 130,000 people in Bamako, Segou and Sikasso, in southern Mali.

Against this backdrop, finding abducted or missing children will prove difficult, as the conflict here has displaced 260,665 people internally, according to the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In addition, there are some 170,313 registered refugees in neighbouring countries such as Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

Many are reluctant to return to their former homes because of the food shortages. Diallo is one of them.

“I’m not in a hurry to go back because even if the war is over, what will we eat? What will I sell and buy in the market? Gao is thirsty, hungry and angry.”

Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme (PNAE) has evolved from the strictly welfare-oriented approach it had when it was created 58 years ago, into a multi-purpose development strategy with educational goals and a focus on stimulating local economies. IPS sat down with its coordinator, Albaneide Peixinho, to discuss its accomplishments and challenges.

Q: The PNAE has existed since 1955. How has it progressed since then?

A: Nowadays it is based on several principles, like the human right to adequate nutrition and the aim of ensuring food and nutritional security by means of free and universal provision for all children and adolescents enrolled in the public education system.

Albaneide Peixinho, coordinator of Brazil’s National School Meals Programme.
Credit: Divulgaçao Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Educaçao

And also on equity and the constitutional right to school meals as a way of guaranteeing equal access to food.

The PNAE is part of the federal government’s Zero Hunger strategy, which encompasses 30 programmes designed to fight the causes of hunger and contribute to eradicating extreme poverty.

The government’s social vision was a key factor in the dramatic fall in poverty in this country, and it was reflected in the PNAE, which since 2003 saw its funding increased by 300 percent and its services expanded to middle-school students.

At the same time, the requirement that the programme must purchase produce from local family farms gives it an important role in reducing social inequality.

Q: What has it achieved?

A: The PNAE was created simply as assistance to some schoolchildren. Now it reaches 45 million students in basic education for the 200 days of the school year. Over the years it has accumulated experience and has taken on an ever wider scope, promoting improvement in educational indicators, economic and social development and social participation in health care, by teaching good eating habits.

The 1988 constitution guaranteed the right (to free school meals) of all pupils enrolled in primary schools. As of 1994, the programme which previously was centralised, with a governing body that drew up menus, bought food and distributed it throughout the country, was converted into a locally managed programme governed by means of agreements.

Since 1998 it has been further improved, for example by insisting on respect for the eating habits and the farming preferences of each locality, and the creation of school nutrition councils as oversight bodies, with representatives of parents, students, teachers, the community and the executive and legislative branches.

One of the main legal frameworks is law 11,947 of 2009, which stipulates that at least 30 percent of the resources of the National Education Development Fund be devoted to buying food produced on family farms, as well as providing the school meal service to all primary education students, including both children and adults.

Q: What problems does the programme face?

A: There are difficulties that are specific to the programme, and others that are inherent to any programme covering the whole of Brazil: the size of the country, the varied agricultural activities in the different regions, and the low productive capacity of family agriculture when it comes to supplying demand.

Other problems include differences in local customs, the different nutritional needs of students, lack of infrastructure to store, transport and prepare meals, a lack of space to set up school lunchrooms, as well as challenges in developing ongoing food and nutritional education that is intrinsic to the educational process.

There is also “competition” between the meals offered by the school and canteens or bars selling sweets, fizzy drinks, salty or fatty snacks, the “favourites” of children and adolescents. A 2009 resolution restricts the amount of fat, sugar and salt in PNAE meals.

Q: And what challenges does the programme intend to address?

A: We plan to carry out a thorough assessment of the nutritional needs of students and match them with adequate nutrition that they find acceptable, as well as with the farming culture and diets of every locality. Another challenge is finding professionals who are well-trained in this field.

Q: Is it possible to reach all primary schools, at federal, state and municipal levels?

A: The programme serves all schools that have formed their own school nutrition council and have hired a nutritionist. In 2012 there were 161,670 such schools, 83 percent of the total.

Q: How are the menus drawn up?

A: They need to be drawn up according to age range, type of school and the hours students spend in school. When two meals are served, at least 30 percent of daily nutritional requirements should be provided. In schools with a full-day curriculum, the minimum is 70 percent. (In Brazil, many schoolchildren attend either the morning or the afternoon shift.)

Q: Has it been demonstrated that school meals improve scholastic performance?

A: There is a variety of evidence on the role of nutrition in neurological, cognitive and intellectual development in childhood. Proteins, calcium, iron, iodine, zinc, vitamins and fish oils fulfil essential functions, as shown by different studies.

The school environment favours the formation of habits. Habits are formed from birth, by means of family customs and those taught by society – at school, in social circles and by the media – up until adult life, when along with symbolic aspects they set the pattern of individual and societal consumption.

The PNAE encourages eating fruits, vegetables and pulses and prescribes food hygiene control, precepts that lead to an adequate supply and healthy intake. The earlier these habits are learned, the greater the probability that they will be continued in adulthood.