ASIA: ‘Business-as-usual’ Approach Means Mixed Record on Children

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 19 2001 (IPS) - When they assemble for a U.N. conference on children in New York next month, South Asian governments will be able to hold up a record of achievement — that more of their children are living to mark their sixth birthday than 10 years ago.

This is because countries in that region have cut by almost half the under-five mortality rates during this period. While in 1990 some 6.8 million children under five years old were estimated to have died in the region, by 1999 this figure had dropped to 3.7 million.

On the other hand, East Asian governments, home to several newly industrialised economies and some fast-growing developing economies, have made impressive strides to guarantee basic primary education for their children. By 2000, close to 80 percent of this region’s children were able to attend primary schools.

But according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which highlighted these achievements in two separate reports released in the run-up to the Sep. 19-21 conference, many of Asia’s children have still to be touched by other areas of care that governments pledged to deliver during the 1990 World Summit for Children.

“Many strategies have been tried and many lessons learned but (the region is) still in a ‘business as usual’ mode since many children are still denied their rights,” Robert Tayabji, UNICEF regional communication advisor for South Asia, said in an interview here.

The pledges made during that 1990 summit included the reduction of 1990 under-five mortality rates by one-third and halving both the 1990 levels of maternal mortality and malnutrition levels among under-five children. Likewise, governments vowed to ensure easy access to safe drinking water and to clean sanitation, access to basic education and the improvement of the protection of children in difficult circumstances.

Yet by 2000, the year the summit’s goals were to have been met, malnutrition is still a pervasive problem in South Asia, home to half a billion of the world’s children.

Close to 80 million children in the region have been stunted as a result, states UNICEF in its report ‘Investing in South Asian Children’.

Equally troubling for UNICEF is the picture regards education. “Forty percent of the 150 million children currently enrolled or about 70 million children are dropping out before completing primary school — more girls than boys will leave school. (And) 220 million of today’s girls and women will be illiterate in 2015,” its report said.

Many South Asian countries have cut the percentage of stunted children over the last decade or so, though a good number still have alarmingly high rates of stunting. In Sri Lanka, this has fallen from 28 percent in 1987 to 14 percent in 1999. Bhutan has slashed this from 53 to 37 percent, Nepal from 65 percent in 1975 to 51 percent in 1999.

But Pakistan has made hardly a stride in this area, with the stunting percentage increasing by one percent as of 1999, compared to 1987. UNICEF also cites the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and Orissa as showing no improvement in addressing the ratio of stunted children from 1990 to 1999.

The UNICEF report is also scathing about South Asia’s treatment of girls, calling it “the most gender insensitive region”. For “virtually every indicator, girls and women are still worse off than boys and men in South Asia and in comparison to other regions,” it stated.

“Governments have acknowledged this problem, but the lead to fight it has come from NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and community groups,” explained Tayabji.

The figures for female illiteracy in South Asia range from 12 percent in the island nation of Sri Lanka, to 55 percent in India, 65 percent in Nepal and up to 71 percent in Pakistan, UNICEF figures show. Likewise, the gender gap in enrollment in Pakistan is six times higher than in China.

Tayabji adds that countries in South Asia with poorer achievement records may face a barrage of criticism from child rights groups during the September U.N. conference, formally called the U.N. Special Session on Children, which will review progress made since the 1990 children’s summit. “They can be taken to task for failing by their children. To make promises is one thing. To deliver is another,” he added.

For all the human development gains they have made for children in recent decades, many East Asian countries, including those in South-east Asia, have on the other hand failed to reduce child malnutrition significantly.

In the report ‘Shaping the Future for Children in East Asia and the Pacific’, UNICEF says that some 30 million children in some parts of the region are affected by malnutrition. As a consequence of this, a quarter of the region’s children being stunted.

“It is not related to food shortages, but to a complex matrix of factors, such as inadequate care and feeding practices, poor child health, a lack of sufficient clean water and proper sanitation and poor nutrition,” said Mehr Khan, UNICEF regional director for East Asia and the Pacific.

“The low status of women in many societies also plays a part, so we can add discrimination to our list of interconnecting factors,” she explained.

Rates of stunting in the developing countries of East Asia range from a high of 46 percent in Cambodia, to a low of a 15 percent in China and Mongolia.

There have also been shortfalls in providing children with access to safe drinking water and clean sanitation in the region. “The EAP (East Asia and Pacific) region has lower safe water coverage than any other region except sub-Saharan Africa, and only South Asia has a lower rate of access to adequate sanitation,” stated the UNICEF report on the state of children in East Asia and the Pacific.

Contaminated water and unclean environments have caused “a large portion of childhood diseases — especially diarrhoea, which is still responsible for many child deaths in the region,” it added.

According to Dr Stephen Atwood, UNICEF’s regional advisor on health and nutrition, both child malnutrition and lack of access to safe drinking water need to become “political priorities” in way education is perceived. “They are all part of the rights a child is guaranteed.”

The decline in public expenditure in social welfare programmes is also another factor behind weaknesses in East Asia’s nurturing of its children. “We know that the rapid socio-economic progress of the past 25 years was driven by a strong investment in social capital, yet over the past decade, public expenditure for health and education has fallen in many countries,” said Khan.

Indeed, the 1997 economic crisis caused many once-booming economies, including newly industrialising ones, to cut back on social spending. Countries like Thailand, however, have been lauded for protecting the education and health sectors from much of these cutbacks.

Thus, East Asia as a whole continues to have lessons in social investment that it can share with other parts of Asia and the world. “As a continent there is much we can learn from the way countries have tried to help their children,” agreed Tayabji. “But what matters is for each to find their respective solutions. The success stories in East Asia may not work in South Asia.”