Ten-year-old Sabah Abdi from Ali Isse, a small rural village on the Somaliland-Ethiopian border, scored well in her recent exams, placing third overall in her local village school of 400 students.
Yet is was just three years ago Sabah spent her days helping with household chores and herding goats, rather than studying because her pastoralist family could not afford her school fees.
Societal taboo and a lack of understanding about stillbirth can cause the issue to be neglected among health practitioners, according to Dr. Danzhen You, a senior adviser on Data and Analytics at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
“Not being able to go to school is not something I’d wish on any child in this world,” said 21-year-old Nujeen Mustafa, a young advocate for refugees who fled the Syrian war with her sister. Mustafa, who now lives in Germany, is also the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) high profile supporter.
Soon schools in Timor-Leste, Ukraine, and Kosovo, where some 6.5 million children are currently at home, will hopefully start teaching their children once again -- albeit online.
Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh knows that his country is in need of an education system that is, “innovative, based on universal principles and values and adaptive of the local realities”.
While the impacts of displacement on wellbeing are well-known, one group has pointed to the equally burdensome economic costs for those displaced as well as host communities.
“I don’t have enough money to buy clean water, so I have to come and collect it from the river. I have young twins – a boy and a girl. I know the water is dirty – it often makes them sick but I have no other option.” Those are the words of a South Sudanese mother, Latif, who lives by the river Nile in Juba.
On the earthen floor, to the sound of a single-string percussion instrument called a
Berimbau, Congolese children stand in a circle practicing rhythmic movements with their arms and feet and chanting.
The Indonesian government is tapping children as advocates against child marriage in this Southeast Asian country where over 340,000 girls get married before they reach 18 years old every year.
South Sudan Monday became the first country to declare famine since 2012, as UNICEF warned that 1.4 million children are at risk of dying from starvation with famine also imminent in Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.
For a long time, no person in Kenya suffered the devastating disability that is caused by polio. In fact, the only reminder in the early 2000s was the victims in the streets of Nairobi, many of whom had been paralyzed as children and adults. Their lives were ravaged by this terrible, vaccine-preventable disease.
Childhood immunisation is one of the safest and most cost-effective health interventions available, yet many of the world's most vulnerable children continue to miss out.
A World Health Organisation report entitled
State of inequality: childhood immunisation was released last week. While the report is mostly good news, immunisation rates are up and many countries have eradicated diseases entirely, a large population of children remain unimmunised.
Millions of children still die before reaching their fifth birthday every year, according to the 2016 State of The World’s Children Report released here Tuesday by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Despite its many lifesaving benefits breastfeeding still struggles to compete with the marketing used by the multi-billion dollar baby formula industry, according to a new report published this week.
A dire humanitarian and security crisis continues to worsen in the Lake Chad Basin with severe consequences for youth, said Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel Toby Lanzer.
Inside a health clinic run by the Catholic Daughters of Saint Anne, a nurse wraps a special tape measure around the upper arm of 2-year-old Rodas cradled in her mother’s arms. The tape reads yellow, meaning “moderately” malnourished, according to the attending nurse.
Though the state of Karnataka in India counts for a higher Human Development Index of 0.478 against the national average of 0.472 in the subcontinent, the continued deficit in water and sanitation continues and the children there are bearing the brunt of the lack of infrastructure.
Mildren Ndlovu* knows the mental toll of Zimbabwe's long-drawn economic hardships in a country where a long rehashed statistic by labour unions puts unemployment at 90 per cent.
High up in the mountainous interior of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the most populous Pacific Island state of 7.3 million people, rural lives are marked by strenuous work toiling land in rugged terrain with low access to basic services.
Cameroon is on the path to introduce genetically modified organisms (GMO’s). This would be overseen by the Cameroon Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the National Biosafety Committee, if the Cameroon Cotton Corporation successfully implements a three-year test cultivation of cotton.