On 26 September 2025, children stand outside a tent being used for medical services at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah in the Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/James Elder

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 29 2026 (IPS)

“I’d never encountered anything like it before. I had no idea that there could be a place that needed humanitarian aid and that a government entity wouldn’t allow physicians or health workers into [that place],” says Jane.*

Jane, a nurse from a Western country, was part of a volunteer medical team that went into Gaza in early 2025 during a ceasefire that ran from January 19 to March 18 last year.

Gaza’s healthcare system had been devastated over the course of the Israeli offensive which had followed Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. According to UNICEF, 94 percent of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed.

Jane tells IPS her team had hoped that during the stop in fighting they would be able to help deliver vital treatment and services which were desperately needed by so many people in the country.

But she says that instead she and her colleagues, who set out for Gaza within weeks of the ceasefire coming into place, ran into seemingly arbitrary obstacles before they even set foot in the country.

Within hours of landing in Jordan, they found out that three physicians and one nurse in the team had been denied entry into Gaza. The following day there were more problems.

“We were at the border with many other NGOs and all of us had been approved to go in [to Gaza]. But then towards the end of the day, they decided that they were going to close the border and not allow anybody through that day. So we had to make our way back to Jordan,” Jane tells IPS.

She says her team lost a week of time when they could have been helping people before they managed to get in. And when they did, she was shocked at what she found.

“It was when we drove into Gaza that it really hit me. You see these kinds of dystopian places in movies or read about them in novels… a van came to pick us up and drove us to our hospital and on this drive I could see nothing but demolished buildings, rubble everywhere. I had to look away a few times because there were skeletons of animals. I’m not sure if there were skeletons of people because I had to look away once I saw the skeletons of animals,” she says.

Things did not improve when she got to the hospital.

“We got to the hospital and at first, although it was different from what I’m used to, it seemed like a functioning hospital… until I started work the next day.”

She describes the hospital, which is one of the largest in Gaza, as lacking even the most basic resources. “They didn’t have paper, they didn’t have gloves, they didn’t have hand sanitiser,” Jane says.

Life-saving equipment such as ventilators for patients struggling to breathe was unavailable, forcing physicians to perform emergency intubations in some cases.

Worst of all though, even when help could have been easily administered to relieve suffering, seemingly arbitrary decisions meant it was not.

“I had a patient – a little girl who had an infection that caused three out of four of her limbs to become gangrenous. All she needed to treat it was a simple medication. But, of course, we weren’t allowed to bring medications in – if [the authorities] found [those medicines on us], they could have either thrown them away or just completely denied us access in.

“This little girl had been in this hospital for at least more than a month – she’d been waiting for a medical evacuation to Jordan, but Israel continued to deny her medical evacuation. At the time I was there, she was supposed to be evacuated, but they denied it – twice while I was there. The first time they did not give a reason and then the second time they said it was because they wouldn’t allow her mother to go with her,” says Jane.

“This little girl was maybe two or three years old and for me, a paediatric and neonatal ICU nurse, this was unfathomable. To expect this toddler to go to another country, likely get her limbs amputated and then have rehabilitation in another country without her mother was ludicrous,” she adds.

Eventually, approval was given for the mother to go with her daughter. But, says Jane, the girl eventually had to have all three limbs amputated.

“It’s a tragedy in and of itself because this could have been remediated with a simple medication or an earlier evacuation. Her limbs became necrotic – they didn’t start out being necrotic. Her limbs being amputated was not something that needed to happen.”

Jane says that of all the patients she treated and all the suffering she saw in the hospital, the case of that girl stands out among her memories today.

Testimony from other doctors and healthcare workers shows that Jane’s experience was not unusual.

Two recent reports which detailed the almost complete destruction of maternal and reproductive healthcare in Gaza as a result of Israeli attacks were based on, or included, testimonies from physicians and healthcare workers, as well as affected women, which highlighted the appalling conditions in healthcare facilities.

Critics of Israel’s offensive in Gaza have variously described Israeli forces’ actions, including attacks on healthcare and other civilian infrastructure, as breaches of international humanitarian law, war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide.

Israel has repeatedly denied such charges and claimed that Hamas’s extensive use of the civilian environment for military purposes meant that large parts of urban Gaza had become legitimate military targets and accused the militant group of building a huge tunnel network under Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and other civilian buildings, housing its command centres and weapons stores.

But critics have also pointed to how the suffering caused by such attacks has been compounded by restrictions on aid coming into Gaza.

Jane, who is now back in her home country, says that these restrictions are continuing, despite a ceasefire having been in place since October.

Israeli authorities have banned certain items from being brought into Gaza over concerns they could be used by militants. But humanitarian and rights groups are critical of both the breadth and scope of ‘dual use’ restrictions imposed by Israel, a lack of clarity over what exactly constitutes a ‘dual use’ item, and seemingly ad hoc limitations on what can be brought in.

Jane said she knew of colleagues who were being refused entry to Gaza for carrying the most basic medical equipment.

“One doctor recently got denied entry because he was trying to bring his stethoscope in and when he said he needed it, the authorities said no, and they took his stethoscope from him and denied him entry,” she says.

Some rights groups say that continued restrictions appear to be irrational and could give rise to questions about their intent.

“Israeli officials, like Hamas officials, are being investigated for international crimes. Israel is being questioned as a state about its compliance with the Genocide Convention. There are provisional orders from the International Court of Justice about complying with the Genocide Convention, which demand that aid restrictions be lifted and that aid be provided, in particular medical aid. The refusal to follow those orders is legally significant,” Sam Zarifi, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), told IPS.

“In analysis of criminal intent, reckless or intentional disregard of foreseeable harm is, and can be, viewed as evidence of intent. The Israeli government has some of the best lawyers in the world, and I hope those lawyers are advising their clients that some of these policies raise very, very important questions about the intent behind them, because they do not seem to be otherwise rational,” he added.

Regardless of any intent, humanitarian groups say restrictions on aid are driving ongoing massive, widescale misery and suffering in Gaza.

This is despite the fact that vital aid is available and ready to be delivered quickly if allowed.

“We have hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving assistance ready outside Gaza. The supplies exist. What we need is more access,” Ricardo Pires, Communication Manager, Division of Global Communications and Advocacy at UNICEF, told IPS.

“We are still hearing about significant restrictions on medical supplies under the notion of being dual use. But we’re [also] looking at things like antibiotics, painkillers, specialised baby food. And these are all available. I mean, what’s very frustrating is that we know from the UN that there are trucks and warehouses full of the necessary supplies, and they can be, and they need to be, and they must be moved in as soon as possible. It is absolutely heartbreaking and mind-blowing and tragic that people in Gaza are still suffering from completely avoidable misery and harm,” added Zarifi.

It remains unclear when, or if, such restrictions will be eased, while a recent announcement by Israel of plans to ban 37 NGOs from operating in Gaza has also been criticised by rights groups who say it will further hinder the delivery of humanitarian aid in the country.

Jane, who would like to return to Gaza for further humanitarian work soon, says she is not hopeful of any improvement for the people there in the near future.

“This has gone on for almost two and a half years and we still don’t have [political] leaders who will stop sending arms to Israel, who will call for a ceasefire when a ceasefire was needed, and then who would actually make sure that the terms of the ceasefire are being are being honoured, because as we’ve seen recently, [Isreal is] continuing to drop bombs. But more than that, you can’t just create a ceasefire, then still not allow aid in. So, it’s hard to have hope for the future for Gaza,” she says.

*Jane’s name and country of origin have been excluded from this feature for her safety.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Excerpt:

Girls in rural Somalia spend a large portion of their time helping with household chores. But thanks to Education Cannot Wait funding many girls are now able to receive an education. Credit: Save the Children

By Abdalle Ahmed Mumin
MOGADISHU, Jun 8 2021 (IPS)

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.

“I’m very glad to be among the top three students in the village school. I am hoping to be a doctor and cure sick people in the village when I grow up,” Sabah told IPS.

Droughts, food insecurity prevent Somaliland children from attending school

Recurrent droughts, food insecurity, water shortages, poverty and inequality hinder efforts to get more Somaliland children in schools. Families in this part of Somaliland are dependent on their livestock for basic food and income, with many moving from place to place in search of good rains and pasture.

In July 2019, the Somaliland Government, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises – and UNICEF Somaliland launched a multi-year resilience programme to increase access to quality education for children and youth impacted by ongoing crises in Somaliland.

The Somaliland national primary net attendance ratio is estimated at 49 percent for boys and 40 percent for girls. Only 16 percent of children who are internally displaced and 26 percent of children in rural communities are enrolled in primary schools. 

If fully funded, ECW’s $64 million three-year education programme will reach 198,440 (out of whom 50 percent are girls) children by end of the third year, including 21,780 supported through ECW’s seed funding. Currently 18,946 students – 46 percent of whom are girls – have benefitted from the programme in 69 targeted schools in six regions. Out of these, a significant number of out of school children 6,342 (3,074 girls) have been enrolled in schools.

In addition, ECW has also launched two other similar multi-year investments in Puntland and in the Federal Government of Somalia and Member States in the amounts of $60 million and $67.5 million, respectively. The three programmes are aligned in outcomes and focus on increasing access to free education for the most marginalised children and youth, including for pastoralist communities.

“The positive impacts of ECW’s multi-year investments in Somalia and the tangible difference we are making together with our partners in the lives of Sabah and so many other marginalised girls and boys are heartwarming and inspiring. For the first time, many of these children and youth can learn and develop themselves in a safe, protective and inclusive environment,” said Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait. “Yet, so much more remains to be done. I call on strategic donor partners to join our efforts and fully fund the three programmes. Together, we can restore the hope of a better future for Somalia’s most vulnerable children and youth.”

The Hani school in Sanaag region, Somalia. Credit: Save the Children

Free schooling thanks to ECW funding

The primary school Sabah attends offers free schooling thanks to support from ECW. It has enabled her and other kids from this rural community to start learning.

Sabah’s mother, Anab Jama, said she is now able to keep her children in the village school while her husband travels with the animals in search of fresh forage and water. “I stayed behind to take care of the children at school. I don’t want them to miss the free education,” Jama told IPS. 

Last year, ECW funding supported the distribution of education kits by local partners and the Somaliland Ministry of Education during the COVID-19 lockdown so children could continue their studies until schools reopened at the end of 2020. The kits included books and solar lamps.

“When the pandemic hit Somaliland, we closed down the school and sent kids back home,” Mohamed Abdi Egal, the headteacher of the Ali Isse primary school, told IPS. “There was not any other option we could provide to continue students’ learning. That was the biggest disruption we saw. When we resumed late 2020, we started to maintain social distancing and hand-washing.”

“Education is considered a vital element in the development of the community but when emergencies unfold like COVID-19 it shows how it hampers provision of essential services, including education,” Egal told IPS.

Thanks to funding 11,052 students, 4,568 of whom are girls, were able to sit for their grade 8 centralised final examinations in Puntland State, Somalia. Credit: Save the Children

Schooling tailored to pastoralist families’ needs

A year after the 2019 programme launched, the number of enrolments of children in the pastoralist community increased substantively – from 12 percent to 50 percent due to the programme design – said Safia Jibril Abdi, UNICEF Education Specialist in charge of managing the ECW-funded programme in Somaliland.

“Education always needs long-term planning. In the drought-affected areas families are on the move and besides that the children do the hard work, such as grazing animals. Girls are core for rural families when it comes to household chores,” continued Abdi.

“We started afternoon classes during the beginning of the school year [in August 2019] and teachers were hired. When the education timing matched the rural families’ lifestyle it brought impact and is much better for rural children.”

The programme targeted children 10 years and above and those who would be able to successfully complete their secondary education in five years within the constraints of their nomadic lifestyles.

Local community members in 15 locations across Somaliland have established education committees to ensure the long-term sustainability of providing education here.

“The goal was to increase access of children to the education with a safe environment. Also, the most important is to make the project sustainable for the local community,” Abdi told IPS. “Girls in school have certain needs, such as sanitary pads, which we provide to them. This helps teenage girls not miss ongoing classes during their periods.”

The UNICEF Education Specialist said that the benefits of the collaborative approach that saw the various actors, including the Ministry of Education, rural communities and civil society organisations, working alongside and with funding from ECW to deliver education for crisis-affected children made the initiative successful.

“It is a sad reality that one in every two children in Somaliland doesn’t have the opportunity for free education. With the launch of the ECW programme we are now able to reach these marginalised children many of whom are in the conflict affected and rural areas,” she said.

Meanwhile, Save the Children, an ECW partner working in Somalia’s Puntland State, has launched multiple distance learning initiatives, including uploading lessons online to help students continue their studies despite COVID-19 lockdowns.

As a result, 11,052 students, 4,568 of whom are girls, were able to sit for their grade 8 centralised final examinations.

“We have created an online learning programme under the ECW fund that targeted primary schools in Puntland. Currently 15,604 students, among them 6,924 girls, have access to education with the support of ECW in Puntland,” Ahmed Mohamed Farah, Save the Children’s ECW Education Consortium manager in Puntland, Somalia, told IPS.

As an ECW implementing agency, Save the Children aims to strengthen the Puntland government education system and enhance the quality by monitoring students’ dropout as well as managing the education system in the four regions it targets in the northeastern Somalia.

According to Farah, ECW funding also paid for the exam fees of 1,000 students from 51 target schools across Somalia.

“Certain students from the low-income families and those in the remote areas could not register for their national primary school exams due to the registration fees therefore we were able to cover for their exam fees.

“Six out of the 10 top grade students were girls. That is the impact,” Farah said.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–

To learn more about Education Cannot Wait’s work for children and youth caught in emergencies and protracted crises, please visit: educationcannotwait.org and please follow @EduCannotWait on Twitter.

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There are nearly two million stillbirths every year. Credit: UNSPLASH/Claudia Wolff

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2020 (IPS)

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).

She shared her insight with IPS after a U.N. high-level meeting organised to raise awareness and to end preventable stillbirths last week.

There are nearly two million stillbirths every year, according to a joint statement released ahead of the event by UNICEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the World Bank Group and the Population Division of the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

At the talk, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for an end to the stigma surrounding stillbirths and for higher investments to prevent them. In the last 20 years, he said, 14 countries, including Cambodia, India and Mongolia have been able to reduce their stillbirth rate by more than half.

But this growth regressed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

With reference to the mothers who suffer from stillbirth, he said: “They need support, not shame.”

Christine Wangechi from Kenya, who suffered a stillbirth last year, said during her trauma, she was not aware that there are other women who had similar experiences.

She said her experience was very “silent” and that she hopes that in speaking publicly, she can help other grieving mothers feel less alone.

Istiyani Purbaabsari, a midwife from Indonesia who spoke at the event, also added that a lack of awareness may be impeding the progress on lowering stillbirths.

The stigma, combined with the lack of awareness or communication about the issue, means it remains left out of conversations, according to You of UNICEF, who is also the Coordinator of the U.N. Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.

Excerpts of the interview with You follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): According to UNICEF, the issue of stillbirths remains low as a priority on the global public health agenda. Why has it not been a priority in these conversations?

Dr. Danzhen You (DY): With two million babies stillborn every year, the burden of stillbirths is enormous. They are invisible in policies and programmes and under-financed as an area requiring intervention.

Most people (including some clinicians) do not have a common understanding of what a stillbirth is; definitions vary across and within countries and cultures. The death of an unborn baby remains a taboo topic in many cultures. Communications work has been insufficient in raising awareness among communities, health professionals, and policy makers about the burden of stillbirth, including numbers, preventability, and the pain and grief it causes to women and families

There is also a lack of understanding of stillbirths, leading to fatalism, guilt and blame. Many clinicians are not aware that most stillbirths are preventable with known interventions; many families and communities also do not realise this, meaning it is often the woman who is blamed or feels responsible for the loss.

IPS: How do the stigma and misconceptions surrounding stillbirth hamper the efforts to end stillbirths?

DY: Stillbirths are often regarded as inevitable events and may be grouped with miscarriages for reporting. In some cultures, stillbirths are perceived as the mother’s fault, resulting in public shaming or individual feelings of guilt or shame that prevent public mourning of their loss.

Moreover, the lack of opportunity to publicly grieve can cause stillbirths to be considered “non-events”. In some countries, stillbirths are perceived as rare, accounting for a negligible fraction of the burden of disease in countries or at global level.

These social taboos, stigmas and misconceptions often silence families or impact the recognition and grieving of stillbirths, contributing to their continuing invisibility.

IPS: How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the issue of stillbirths?

DY: The world is currently scrambling to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic might be leading to disruptions in health services. Our analysis shows that the response to the pandemic could worsen the situation by potentially adding nearly 200,000 stillbirths to the global tally over a 12-month period in 117 low and middle-income countries in a scenario with severe health service disruptions (around 50 percent) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This number may underestimate the additional stillbirth burden that could occur.

However, we were missing opportunities to prevent families from experiencing the pain of stillbirths even before the pandemic. Few women received timely and high-quality care to prevent stillbirths. In half of the 117 low and middle-income countries analysed, less than two to 50 percent of pregnant women received key interventions that could prevent stillbirths. For example, coverage for assisted vaginal delivery – a critical intervention for preventing intrapartum stillbirths – is estimated to reach less than half of pregnant women in low-and middle-income countries.

IPS: What are some challenges that remain with  gathering statistics on the issue?

DY: The targets specific to stillbirths were absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are still missing in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Many countries do not have a defined stillbirth target. Among the 93 countries that have reported on their progress using the Every Newborn Action Plan tracking tool, only 30 have a defined stillbirth target, compared to 78 countries with a neonatal mortality target.

Stillbirths are largely absent in worldwide data tracking, rendering the true extent of the problem hidden. Sixty two countries had either no stillbirth data or insufficient quality data. While the causes of neonatal death are tracked globally by WHO, there are no such data for stillbirth.

IPS: What do you think is the way ahead?

DY: Progress is possible with sound policy, investment and programmes. For example, Southern Asia, which has the second highest stillbirth rate of all regions in the world, has reduced the stillbirth rate by 44 percent since 2000.

We must do better, faster, or 20 million babies will be stillborn by 2030. There is hope, but only if we act now, collectively, by raising voices, increasing awareness, reducing stigma, taboo and misconception.

Globally 75 million children who cannot access education as a result of crises. A dated photo of a Syrian child in a refugee camp in Jordan. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS.

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Aug 13 2020 (IPS)

“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.

Speaking at a virtual seminar hosted by Education Cannot Wait (ECW) a day after the organisation launched its 2019 Annual Results Report, Mustafa said growing up in Syria was not easy. Even before the war, she said, she had to educate herself at home via TV, with the assistance of her older siblings, because government buildings were not accessible to someone who had to use a wheelchair like herself. Mustafa was born with cerebral palsy.

“As the conflict started, the situation deteriorated even further,” Mustafa told over 700 participants of the webinar held on International Youth Day, Aug. 12. “I had to flee because my safety was jeopardised.”

The high-level webinar was also addressed by former United Kingdom prime minister Gordon Brown, Norwegian Refugee Council secretary-general Jan Egeland,  Afghanistan minister of education H.E. Rangina Hamidi, Theirworld president Justin Van Fleet, Norway minister of international development Dag-Inge Ulster and Canada’s parliamentary secretary Kamal Khera, among others.

Mustafa said the 75 million children who cannot access education as a result of crises was a demonstration of a failure on everyone’s part and that it was “unacceptable and inexcusable”. Her story resonates with many of the children in countries experiencing emergencies or conflict as highlighted in the ECW annual report titled Stronger Together in Crises.

Speaking at the same event, former United Kingdom prime minister Brown said the world has a lost generation of 30 million refugees, 40 million displaced and 75 million in conflict and emergency zones.

“We now have the COVID generation deprived of school,” said Brown who is chair of the ECW high-level steering group and also the U.N. special envoy for global education. “Some people think 30 million children will never return to school even though they have been there before the pandemic.”

Brown said it was necessary to send a message of hope based on three pillars. Firstly, faith that education can bridge the gap between what people are and what they have in themselves to become. Secondly, the message should be based on the belief that every child who is in a conflict or emergency zone can be brought to school. Finally, he said the message should be based on confidence that the $310 million needed by ECW to do its work can be raised.

“Hope doesn’t just die when a refugee ship is lost at a sea,” said Brown. “Hope dies when young people cannot plan and prepare for the future because there’s no school, no education within their grasp.”

Although there is still a long way to go in supporting children and youth in conflict countries, the Stronger Together in Crises Report shows significant progress. From 2017 to 2019, the primary enrolment rate for refugee children improved from 53 percent to 75 percent in Uganda and from 62 percent to 67 percent in Ethiopia. ECW disbursed $131 million across 29 countries in 2019, more than its 2017 and 2018 investments combined.

“Globally, the share of education in all humanitarian funding increased from 4.3 percent in 2018 to 5.1 percent in 2019, representing a record amount of over $700 million,” reads the report.

ECW director, Yasmine Sherif, attributes the progress made to three reasons. Firstly, breaking down silos and having all stakeholders working together to mobilise resources.   

“Remove this whole issue of trying to raise money for oneself, one’s own siloed area but we’re bringing it to the sector, bringing it to the children and the youth out there and that’s what the fund does,” said Sherif.

Secondly, Sherif said, removing bureaucracy has resulted in moving with record speed in response to COVID-19.  She said just a few weeks after the World Health Organisation declared it a pandemic, ECW was able to deliver in 27 countries and exhaust its entire emergency funding that was available and attracted more funding for a second round.

“Thirdly, ECW is part of a multilateral system that has been questioned over the years but if we’re going to be stronger together we have to be multilateralist,” she said. “We have to believe in the multilateral system that was created precisely for this.”

Sherif said 3.6 million children have been reached through a holistic approach that caters the needs of a child and youth from mental health and psychosocial services to school feeding where WFP plays an important role. Considering that teachers are mentors and role models to young people during their formative years, ECW involves their training.

ECW also provides cash assistance that allows most families of the 75 million children who are living in extreme poverty to send their children to school because they may not be able to do so even if the school itself is free. It also creates infrastructure that is conducive to children with disabilities and provides protection especially in countries where there is violence and conflict. It also empowers governments to build their own coordination units and sustain the investments made   

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is hosting the ECW secretariat. UNICEF executive director, Henrietta Fore, said there is not enough advocacy to support children in conflict and emergency zones with learning, yet education is part of the humanitarian and development agenda.

“It is needed in the first day of the crises as you can see from Nujeen and it is needed five years later,” said Fore. “So, we have to think differently, it is a continuum of assistance we’re giving.”

She said the best thing that has been discovered is giving the world a great idea. One great idea that is considered is, if everyone could join with connecting every young person to learning everywhere, it would make a big difference.

“If we could do this in the next couple of years, it would change the world and it would make people realise that education is the foundation of all humanitarian and development response,” she said.

Ensuring that the education needs of children in crises zones needs resources and ECW is appealing for more support.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) estimates that more than 1.5 billion children from more than 190 countries are at home because of the global coronavirus lockdown. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 24 2020 (IPS)

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. 

A learning platform, originally designed to assist refugee and displaced children, was launched this week to address the current global crisis affecting children who are out of school as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Timor-Leste, Ukraine, and Kosovo are the first three countries to adopt the programme for their schools, which includes programmes such as online books, videos, and additional material and resources for children with special needs and their parents.

“Timor-Leste, Kosovo and Ukraine, where approximately 6.5 million learners have been affected by school closures, were the first to identify a need; gain necessary approvals; and access relevant content to support the roll out of the Learning Passport in their markets,” United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Chief of Education Robert Jenkins told IPS.

The platform that was designed to assist refugee and displaced children was launched this week to address the current global crisis affecting children who are out of school as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The programme, called “Learning Passport” was launched to “help children continue their education from home during the pandemic,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the Secretary-General António Guterres, said at a press briefing on Monday. 

“It was scheduled to start as a pilot programme this year, but it has now been scaled up to become available in all countries with a curriculum that can be taught online,” he added. 

It was designed in partnership between UNICEF, Microsoft and the University of Cambridge. 

According to the latest estimate by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 1.57 billion children from more than 190 countries are impacted because of the global coronavirus lockdown. 

Reality for refugee children

Meanwhile, Jenkins said that under the current lockdown the refugee children are likely to face increased risk.

“The needs of refugee children are even more acute,” Jenkins told IPS this week, adding that children who are displaced have limited access to a host of services such as testing and treatment.

On top of all these factors, measures taken to address the pandemic such as lockdowns and school shutdowns are affecting their safety and education.

“We are seeing that some displaced children – many of whom rely on school for their one nutritious meal a day and access to clean water – are going without the basics,” says Jenkins.  “Moreover, displaced children are likely to face an increased risk of neglect, abuse, gender-based violence and child marriage as families are left with even more socioeconomic hardship.”

For a community already living under hardship, this is only further exacerbating the problem, says Jenskins. He voiced concerns that many who have been restricted to go to school might never return to school once the lockdowns are lifted. 

18 months in the making

The ‘Learning Passport’ has been in the making for 18 months, and was scheduled to be launched this year for the education of refugee children. Once the pandemic broke and schools started being shut down, the programme went through an expansion process in order to address this new and urgent need. 

Jenkins added that UNICEF is working with teams on the ground in different countries to “identify specific gaps and needs; validate the above criteria; and identify and map”.

Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, has said that the solution should be exactly how the problem is: one with no borders. He also highlighted that the programme will be effective with collaboration of public and private sectors. 

A continuing gap

One gap that remains, however, is that the programme is accessible only to those who have access to the internet. Only 30 percent of low-income countries have been able to ensure digital training for students, as IPS reported last week. 

Neither Microsoft nor UNICEF, however, were able to give details on how this would address the digital divide that excludes many children who don’t have access to to the internet or digital technology, in mainly low socio-economic countries. 

“For children and youth who do not have access to an internet connection there should be solid plans in place to ensure the continuity of learning – through radio programmes, television and textbooks,” Jenkins said. “Teachers, parents and trusted community members must be able to guide children through their learning and check on their progress.”

Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country, a new report states. Credit:Tess Bacalla/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 2020 (IPS)

There is no country that is on the right path to ensure the safety, health and proper environment for their children, an explosive report has claimed. 

The report “A future for the world’s children?” was released in a joint venture by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and The Lancet on Wednesday. 

“Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country,” the report stated.

It reiterated the need to take into account the “ecological sustainability and equity” in order to make sure that all children, including the most vulnerable, are safe and their futures on the right track.

The report examined and made recommendations in four key areas: early investment in children’s health and education; omission of greenhouse gases as a means to protect children’s future; to address the issue of “commercial harm” done to children; and the key role governments ought to play in ensuring care and protection for all children. 

One of the key observations was made in the section of climate change, where authors claimed an onus of the responsibility falls on a certain section of society.

“The poorest countries have a long way to go towards supporting their children’s ability to live healthy lives,” the report read, “but wealthier countries threaten the future of all children through carbon pollution, on course to cause runaway climate change and environmental disaster.” 

Anthony Costello, Professor of Global Health and Sustainable Development at University College London, pointed out a host of ways in which wealthier countries can do so. He shared with IPS a list of measures wealthier countries can take:

• Stop subsidies to oil, gas and diesel fossil fuels on which governments spend more than $5 trillion per year. Renewables are now cheaper and more economic than fossil fuels.
• Ask big finance to divest from fossil fuel companies. This is gaining momentum.
• Make the transition rapidly to electrified cars and public transport.
• Change our food system: promote a healthier diet based on less red meat and dairy. Tackle the one third wastage of all food with more local production and less transport.
• Plant 500 billion trees. This is doable over ten years. Grazing animals don’t need to be in open fields. Silvopasture is where you graze them in fields with trees. 
• Move to conservation agriculture.
• Cut taxes on income and replace taxes on carbon. This way people can exercise their preference to a low carbon life.

Another key observation made in the report was about the widely negative impact of “commercialisation” on the well-being of children. The authors of the report recommended that the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) adopt a new protocol that would protect children from commercial harm.

“The commercial sector’s profit motive poses many threats to child health and wellbeing, not least the environmental damage unleashed by unregulated industry,” read the report. “More immediately, children around the world are enormously exposed to advertising from business, whose marketing techniques exploit their developmental vulnerability and whose products can harm their health and wellbeing.”

The report acknowledged the role commercial entities play in job creation and generating economic growth, but reiterated that children need to be protected from these companies’ promotion of “addictive or unhealthy commodities,” including fast-food,  alcohol, and tobacco, gambling, and social media as they have a significant effect on the well-being of children. 

Djibouti’s Minister of Higher Eduction and Scientific Research Nabil Mohamed Ahmed (right) speaks at the International Summit on Balanced and Integrated Education, which his country is hosting. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
DJIBOUTI CITY, Jan 27 2020 (IPS)

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”.

With a population of  less than a million, Djibouti is one of the smallest countries in Africa. However, the number of challenges blocking its way to implementing inclusive education are massive: flood, droughts, landslides and political conflicts.

“In the past two months, we have been hit by a huge flood. Before that, we had repeated droughts. And now we have an invasion of crickets in Djibouti. So, beside the social problems, we have been also facing climatic challenges,”  Djibouti’s Minister of Higher Eduction and Scientific Research Nabil Mohamed Ahmed told IPS.

And each of these disasters takes toll on the education system.

Perhaps it is one of the reasons why his country is hosting the third edition of the International Summit on Balanced and Integrated Education, which started Monday, Jan. 27, in the country’s capital Djibouti City. Inaugurating the summit, President Guelleh telling said: “This summit is a step closer to the future we want.”

Djibouti has been making steady progress with regards to its education system, Ahmed said.

It’s been confirmed by the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which found that the number of students accessing high school education increased from less than 10 percent in 2011 to over 80 percent currently.

There has also been a new focus on providing an education that can boost the employability of this Horn of Africa nation’s youth.

“When they can’t find jobs, they are pushed to terrorism,” Ahmed pointed out.

• Djibouti is on high security alert, especially since Al-Shabaab — the Somali-based terror organisation — called for attacks on the country.  Though no major attack has taken place since 2014, security concerns still remain very high across the nation, especially the regions bordering Eritrea and Somalia.

Most of Djibouti’s conflict-ridden neighbours in the region — Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan — are not participating in summit.

But Hassan Ali Khayre, the Prime Minister of Somalia — arguably one of the most conflict-ridden nations in Africa today — said that the country has been making a conscious effort to make universal education available to all Somalis, especially girls and women.

According to UNICEF, fewer than 50 percent of Somali girls attend primary school. Low availability of sanitation facilities such as separate toilets for girls, a lack of female teachers, safety concerns and social norms that favour boys’ education are cited as factors inhibiting parents from enrolling their daughters in school.

However, at the summit, Somalia’s government claimed to have taken several measures to improve girls’ education.

“In 2017, we developed a national education policy to provide free universal education from Kindergarten 1. We have also ratified the convention on child rights, so that no child is left out,” Somalia’s Minister of Education Mahdi Mohamed Gulaid said.

Oludoun Mary Omolara, the assistant Director at the Nigerian federal ministry of education, attended the International Summit on Balanced and Integrated Education in Djibouti. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Innovative models

Oludoun Mary Omolara is an assistant Director at the federal ministry of education in Nigeria. The West African nation has been hardest hit by the terrorism unleashed by Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, which is vehemently opposed to school education.

The country’s northern provinces have faced several violent attacks, including the kidnapping of 276 girls from their boarding school in 2014 — who are now known as the Chibok girls.

The region is reported to have the world’s highest rate of schoolgirl dropouts and the country itself has over 13 million out-of-school children — the largest in the world.

Though Nigeria has a universal education system, Omolara said that the national policy in border areas could be more inclusive, making it capable of addressing additional, crucial, life skills needed by people in conflict and border regions.

“The borders are porous (in northern Nigeria) there is constant cross-border migration  and frequent terror attacks. In such situations, we need to provide an education that can enable both teachers and students the knowledge to tackle these issues. For example, the locals need to know safety skills, which should be infused into the education policy so that teachers know how to safeguard their students in the face of an attack,” Omolara told IPS.

On Jan. 28, UNICEF issued an emergency alert stating that nearly 5 million children in central Sahel, particularly Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, will need humanitarian assistance this year. Violence in the region has surged, including “attacks against children and civilians, abductions and recruitment of children into armed groups”.

“When we look at the situation in the Central Sahel, we cannot help but be struck by the scale of violence children are facing. They are being killed, mutilated and sexually abused, and hundreds of thousands of them have had traumatic experiences,” Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said in a statement.

Nigeria, according to Omolara, has drafted a document to introduce this training in all the schools. So far, 400 people have been trained, and they in turn will train others. However, it is yet to be integrated into the national education policy, she said.

The country is also considering introducing multiple languages in its schools, especially in the border areas that continue to receive refugee students who speak different languages.

“We are an English-speaking country, but our neighbours speak French. A lot of migrants and refugees are Arabic speaking. So, we need a multi-lingual education environment.

“Also, if people are not able to understand the language of the terrorists or conflicts, they are also unlikely to deal with them. So, while we need a lot of sensitisation of people living at the conflict areas on peace education, we also must help them understand the situation and reject the terror ideologies,” Omolara told IPS.

However, there are still areas where private investment could be of help. This includes rural electricity and support for the disabled.

“Our government is doing all it can, but there are areas where we need help. For example, lack of electricity in the conflict region is a huge challenge. Some people are buying generators, but it could help to have more  private investment,” she concluded.

The 3-day summit, organised by the Education Relief Foundation (ERF), will conclude on Jan. 29 with signing of a Universal Declaration on universal inclusive education by state leaders.

** This story contains an update including information on the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) alert about millions of children in the Sahel in need of emergency humanitarian assistance this year.

The city of Mogadishu now hosts more than 600,000 IDPs—one-third of the total figure in the East African nation. This dated picture shows one of the many refugee camps outside of Somalia’s capital which played host to almost 400,000 famine refugees who fled to Mogadishu for aid at the height of the 2011 famine. A year later they had still been living in refugee camps and some eight years later more remain. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 14 2019 (IPS)

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.

In a new report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) examines the financial costs of internal displacement across major crises around the world, raising awareness of the importance of preventing future displacement as well as responding to such situations efficiently.

“We have long understood the devastating impact internal displacement can have on the safety and wellbeing of people affected by conflict, violence, disasters and development projects,” said IDMC’s Director Alexandra Bilak.

“But internal displacement also places a heavy burden on the economy, by limiting people’s ability to work and generating specific needs that must be paid for by those affected, their hosts, governments or aid providers,” she added.

Looking at the economic costs of the consequences of internal displacement on key needs and services such as health, shelter, and income in eight countries, IDMC found that the average cost per internally displaced persons (IDPs) was 310 dollars.

With 40 million displaced around the world, the global financial impact of displacement reaches 13 billion  dollars annually.

The report also notes that the impacts of internal displacement are far higher in low-income countries, partially due the lack of capacity to minimise impacts of crises.

The Central African Republic (CAR) is one such low-income country, with over 70 percent of the country estimated to be living in poverty.

CAR has seen decades of instability and violence, and its most recently conflict has resulted in an ongoing, dire humanitarian crisis and the displacement of over 1 million people, more than half of whom have stayed within the country’s borders.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in four children is either displaced or a refugee.

IDMC calculated that the economic impacts of internal displacement in the central African country between 2013 and 2017 total 950 million dollars. This represents 230 million dollars annually, equivalent to 11 percent of the country’s pre-crisis gross domestic product (GDP).

Almost 40 percent of the total cost comes from the impacts of displacement on nutrition and food security.

Approximately two million people are severely food insecure in the country, while UNICEF projects that over 43,000 children under the age of five will face severe acute malnutrition which, if left untreated, is fatal.

Combined with the additional costs associated with providing healthcare to IDPs in emergency settings, health accounts for half of the economic impact of the Central African Republic displacement crisis.

In Somalia, drought alone cost the country 500 million dollars annually between 2017 and 2018, representing almost five percent of the country’s pre-crisis GDP. The country-wide drought lead to 892,000 new displacements in the country in 2017.

As the drought left rural communities unable to cultivate and live off their lands, the highest economic impact is associated to the provision of food assistance to IDPs.

IDMC also found high impacts on housing and infrastructure as the drought drove many Somalis to urban and peri-urban areas in search of new sources of income. However, this further stretched the already limited capacity of municipalities to provide basic services such as water and sanitation.

The city of Mogadishu now hosts more than 600,000 IDPs—one-third of the total figure of IDPs in the East African nation.

“This new research clearly shows the risk internal displacement represents, not only for human rights and security but also for national development,” said Bilak.

By identifying the areas in which internal displacement has the highest cost can help governments and aid providers target their interventions, the report notes.

However, more and better data is needed.

“More data and analysis are needed to further identify where the financial losses are greatest and help governments and aid providers prevent future displacement, as well as respond more efficiently to existing crises,” Bilak concluded.

Credit: BIgstock

By Sanjay Wijesekera
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 2017 (IPS)

“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.

This week, finance ministers gathered at the IMF - World Bank Spring Meetings will discuss how to achieve the sustainable development goal of providing clean water and sanitation for all by 2030
Latif’s struggle for clean water is shared by billions of people around the world, in fact today almost two billion people will use a source of drinking water contaminated with faeces  due to a lack of funds or access. Without safe water, Latif’s children risk joining the 1,400 children under the age of five who die from diarrhoea daily.

It doesn’t have to be this way. More and better managed resources can help provide water and sanitation access for all.

This week, finance ministers gathered at the IMF – World Bank Spring Meetings will discuss how to achieve the sustainable development goal of providing clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. In addition to providing access and basic infrastructure, developing countries are now urged to ensure that this access is efficient, equitable, universal and safely managed.  But how will it be financed?

Ministers will look at the magnitude of the financial challenge, how to use existing resources more efficiently, and how to access additional resources, focusing in particular on domestic sources – a mammoth task when we know that the price tag for meeting these ambitious goals is about $114 billion per year (excluding operating and maintenance costs).

Charity Ncube, 30, of the rural town of Masvingo in southeastern Zimbabwe, carries her child and a 20-litre container of water. Credit: Sally Nyakanyanga/IPS

UNICEF and its partners are working towards equipping and supporting governments and others to achieve the sustainable development goals. We believe that reaching the most vulnerable and the most disadvantaged is more cost-effective and yields a higher return on investment.

And the evidence is backing us up. A 2013 study study showed that improving sanitation for the poorest households actually brings greater, more immediate health benefits for all.

Echoing Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director, ‘When we reach the most disadvantaged people we dramatically improve an entire society’s health, education, equality and economic prospects over the long term.’

Excerpt:

Capoeira for peace in DRC. Credit: Stefano Toscano

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANIERO, Brazil, Apr 3 2017 (IPS)

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.

They are doing Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that merges the practice of sports, acrobatics, music and popular culture.This Afro-Brazilian cultural practice, simultaneously a fight and a dance, functions as an affirmation of mutual respect between communities.

It was started in Brazil by the descendants of African slaves, and in 2014 Capoeira was recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This Afro-Brazilian cultural practice, simultaneously a fight and a dance, functions as an affirmation of mutual respect between communities and individuals promoting social integration and the memory of resistance.

Capoeira has been used as a powerful tool to help demobilized children and adolescents from armed groups and victims of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). With the practice comes self-confidence, emotional strengthening, community-building, overcoming gender differences, and reducing inequalities.

Independent Brazilian journalist Fabíola Ortiz and photographer/videomaker Flavio Forner intend to visit in loco how Capoeira is being used with Congolese children in North Kivu.

Both media professionals recently launched an in-depth reporting project that aims to report on the benefits of this martial art to heal trauma. The duo plan to immerse themselves in the universe of Brazilian Capoeira in the DRC.

Forner and Ortiz are dedicated to the coverage of development and human rights. They believe in the role of independent in-depth journalism to promote public debate, encourage change and keep the UN Sustainable Development Goals on the global agenda.

Capoeira for peace in DRC. Credit: Stefano Toscano

“There is a need for groundbreaking and innovative storytelling approaches to report on conflict and trauma. Information has a powerful role in defusing tension, reducing conflicts, and contributing to the healing process of traumatic events,” said Ortiz.

Independent journalism may act as unifier in a polarized society and has a pivotal role in conflict prevention, management and resolution, they believe.

Capoeira in North Kivu

Twice a week, girls at the Heal Africa hospital in central Goma, North Kivu’s capital, are taught Capoeira. Boys at the Transit and Guidance Centre (CTO) run by the Concerted Action for Disadvantaged Young People and Children (CAJED) also learn this martial art. The CTO is a place for helping the reintegration into society of child victims of violence and who have been demobilized from armed gangs.

This centre for vulnerable children directs its efforts towards demobilizing, supporting and reintegrating children into their families. Partnering with UNICEF since 2003, CAJED has hosted more than 11,000 children removed from armed groups of the DRC.

Since August 2014, around 40 children join Capoeira classes on a weekly basis. With the support of UNICEF, the Brazilian Embassy in Kinshasa, AMADE-Mondiale and HSH Princess Caroline of Monaco, this initiative led by a Brazilian Master Flavio Saudade introduces children to the practice.

In a war-torn country with ethnic roots and embedded with commercial interests, it is crucial to rebuild community ties and restore a culture of peace.

“Capoeira is a social technology developed in Brazil from a cultural tradition of African origin. Its use in conflict zones to reduce violence is a recent phenomenon with encouraging results,” stressed the Brazilian Ambassador to the D.R.C Paulo Uchôa Ribeiro when the initiative started in 2014.

So far, the initiative has benefitted around 3,000 children, according to Flavio Saudade, a Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF and a Capoeira master.

“We are trying to address a serious problem: the forced child recruitment. Today I see that Capoeira has a great mission, the one of building a society free of so many violence. We hear testimonies from children who went through forced military trainings and were obliged to kill their parents and commit grave crimes,” said Saudade.

Instead of carrying an AK-47 rifle, Congolese children are now taught how to play a Berimbau. “How many lives we might save when we teach them how to play an instrument rather than shooting a weapon,” he said.

Political Instability

The conflict in the DRC officially ended in 2002 with a peace agreement, but this war-torn country with 77 million people in Central Africa still struggles to heal the wounds from armed clashes that perpetuate to the present day. Around six million people lost their lives. The current fighting continues to be characterized by violence and brutality against civilians, causing waves of internally displaced persons. The conflict generated a mass exodus of 1.7 million people.

Despite being one of the richest countries with diamond, gold, copper, cobalt and zinc, the DRC is among the world’s least developed nations. Its abundant land, water, biodiversity and minerals have fueled longstanding tensions. The legacy of years of atrocities, instability and widespread violence resulted in more than half of its population living below the poverty line.

The instability in the country has awaken recently with Joseph Kabila’s presidential mandate that came to an end last December 2016, after 17 years in power. Kabila was to lead a transitional government until elections due to be held by the end of this year. However, the opposition has accused the government of undermining efforts to offer a peaceful exit.

The discontentment arose in the face of the failure of political negotiations that was mediated by the Catholic Church in the DRC.

Last March 31, the Security Council extended the mandate of the United Nations mission in the DRC for another year but reduced the number of troops. In a resolution unanimously adopted, the 15-member body decided to keep the UN Organization Stabilization Mission (MONUSCO) until March 2018.

*To learn more about the independent in-depth reporting project led by the Brazilian journalist Fabíola Ortiz and the photographer Flavio Forner, visit their website: www.capoeiracongo.com. They are also on Facebook and Twitter.

Lenny N. Rosalin, Deputy Minister for Child Growth and Development of Indonesia’s Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection. Credit: Kanis Dursin/IPS

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Mar 14 2017 (IPS)

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.

Lenny N. Rosalin, Deputy Minister for Child Growth and Development of the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection, said her agency has been working with the National Child Forum across the country to explain the impacts of child marriage on health, education, and economic condition.“What is clear is that child marriage can be prevented if we explain its risks to children and parents." --Lenny N. Rosalin

National Child Forum, locally known as Forum Anak Nasional, is designed to be a venue for children under 18 years to air their aspirations on development programmes, from the planning to monitoring and the evaluation stage. According to its website, Forum Anak is now present in 33 of Indonesia’s provinces, 267 regencies and municipalities, 300 sub- districts, and 197 villages across the country.

“We are empowering children to be able to say no to child marriage and to tell other kids to do the same when asked to get married by their parents,” Rosalin told IPS in an interview in Jakarta.

Annually, around 340,000 Indonesian girls get married before they turn 18 years old, according to a survey published by the National Statistics Agency (BPS) in 2016. The publication, the first of its kind, was funded by the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The figure shows child marriage has fallen two-fold in the past three decades. However, according to the Council of Foreign Relations, Indonesia is one of ten countries in the world with the highest child marriage rate and the second after Cambodia in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The exact number of children engaged in child marriage is difficult to gauge, however, as most of them have no birth certificate to prove their age.

In 2013, at least 50 million children under 18 years had no birth certificates, or 62 percent of the country’s children of 85 million at that time, according to the Indonesian Commission on Child Protection (KPAI). Indonesian children under 18 years now stand at around 87 million.

Forum Anak members are also taught to alert the Women Empowerment and Child Protection office in their area if they feel they cannot convince peers to say no to parents who force them to get married.

“When we receive reports of children being forced to get married, we invite local religious leaders and influential figures to convince parents of child-bride-to-be to cancel the wedding,” said Rosalin.

She claimed the strategy has worked so far but could not give an estimate of how many children have been spared from that practice since January 2016, when her ministry was tasked with preventing and eradicating child marriage in Indonesia, saying they were yet to hold a national meeting to evaluate and collect data.

“What is clear is that child marriage can be prevented if we explain its risks to children and parents,” Rosalin said.

Indonesia’s 1974 marriage law sets the legal marriage age at 16 years old for girls and 19 years for boys, contradicting the child protection law that bans parents from marrying off children below 18 years old. Worse still, the legislation also allows children under 16 years to get married as long as their parents apply for and the state court grants dispensation to them.

Budi Wahyuni, deputy chairwoman of the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), said ideally the legal marriage age should be raised to 21 years old, or at least 18 years as stipulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under the current situation, however, the court must be selective in granting dispensation for children under 16 years old to get married.

“For example, a dispensation is given to a bride who is already pregnant only,” Wahyuni said.

The marriage law gives no clear stipulation under what circumstances the court may grant a dispensation to children under 16 years to get married.

Several child activists here filed a judicial review with the Constitutional Court in 2015, seeking to raise the minimum marriage age from 16 years to at least 18 years old. The court, however, threw out the petition, arguing that it was the domain of the House of Representatives (DPR).

There are many reasons why parents marry off their children. First and foremost is a long-held belief that it is better to become a widow as a child than to delay marriage, according to Listyowati, Executive Director of Kalyanamitra Foundation, a non-governmental organization that promotes the rights of women.

“Many people still think that when a girl already had her first menstruation, she is already mature and ready to become a wife and mother. In such communities, girls who delay marriage are branded as old virgins even if they are still under 18 years old,” said Listyowati.

“The term old virgin has such a negative connotation that both girls and their parents feel humiliated when called so, putting pressure on them to get married early. For them, it’s better to become a child widow than to delay marriage,” said Listyowati.

Poor families, according to Listyowati, see child marriage as a way to ease economic burden as the girl moves out and stays with her husband.

“The sad thing is parents who got married while they were still children tend to marry off their young kids also,” lamented Listyowati.

Child marriage carries several risks and consequences, including high maternal and infant mortality rate. Children who get married usually drop out of school immediately and engaging in sexual activity at a very young age also runs the risk of cervical cancer.

In 2015, Indonesia’s mother mortality rate was recorded at 359 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2015, compared to only 228 in 2000. According to the National Population and Family Planning Board, at least 82 percent of the deaths involved young mothers aged 14 to 20 years old. Meanwhile, the country’s infant mortality rate stood at 22 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2015.

The Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection has also set up so-called Family Learning Centers, known by its Indonesian name Puspaga, at provincial and regency capitals and municipalities where government-appointed psychologists and psychiatrists provide free counseling, including the issue of child marriage.

On top of that, the government encourages schools, provinces, regencies, and municipalities to become more child-friendly, with indicators including 12-year mandatory schooling, zero child labor, and zero child marriage.

“When all children attend 12 years of mandatory education, then there will be no more child marriage or child labor,” said Rosalin of the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection.

“Around 1,400 schools around the country have pledged to become child-friendly schools,” she added.

Listyowati of Kalyanamitra Foundation praised the Indonesian government’s move to engage children in its campaign against child marriage in the country. However, the move may prove inadequate if the marriage law still allows children to get married.

“The move should be followed up with a change in legislation. The marriage law must be amended to raise legal marriage age to at least 18 years old,” Listyowati stressed.

“The government must start introducing sex education. I know it’s still a taboo to talk about sex education, especially to children. In fact, some quarters see it as a way to teaching children how to engage in sexual activities but children have to know the risks of engaging in sexual activities at a very young age,” she said.

Rosalin said her ministry has submitted the draft of a government regulation on marriage in lieu of law to the office of the Presidential Advisory Council to replace the current marriage law.

“The draft is seeking two things. First, we want to increase the legal marriage age to 21 years old, or at least 18 years old, and secondly, scrap any sort of dispensation that may give room to child marriage,” Rosalin said.

Credit: ©UNICEFKENYA/2011/MODOLA

By Rudi Eggers and Werner Schultink
NAIROBI, Jan 20 2017 (IPS)

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.

A five-day polio campaign that started on 18 January, 2017 targets more than 2.9 million children below the age of 5 years in fifteen counties. Children in high-risk areas -- some of whom have never had access to immunization services before -- will have an opportunity to be vaccinated against polio.
Sadly, in 2013 a large outbreak of polio in Nigeria spread across the continent, affecting several countries on its way east. Kenya was not spared.  Fourteen new polio cases were confirmed. The polio virus struck those that were unvaccinated – the most vulnerable and the most excluded — children in areas with poor access to health services, refugees, and nomadic communities.  Fortunately, a rapid response by the Kenyan Government brought the polio outbreak under control, and the last case was reported in July 2013.  At that time, it seemed that the country was well on the road to being declared polio-free.

However, recently, concerned scientists have pointed to the increasing risk of polio, particularly the large numbers of children who remain unvaccinated, especially those in vulnerable populations in the northern part of the country and in the informal settlements of Nairobi and Mombasa.  Furthermore, the notion that the African continent was free from the polio virus was shattered when four new polio cases were reported in northern Nigeria. Given the previous experience, health experts and Ministries of Health recommended that the areas with low vaccination rates should be targeted with vaccination campaigns, specifically designed to reach those that missed out on the routine vaccinations.

Since the establishment of the Expanded Programme of Immunization (EPI) in 1980, Kenya deserves credit for reaching majority of the children with life-saving vaccines. But there is still a lot more work that needs to be done; progress in the country is very uneven and many children remain unvaccinated. It is estimated that 400,000 (3 out of 10) children still do not receive all the required scheduled doses of vaccines by their first birthday. This build-up of under-immunized children has previously contributed to outbreaks of polio. Most of these children come from poor families, the urban informal settlements and the hard-to-reach parts of the country, particularly arid and semi-arid (ASAL) regions where access to health services is limited.

A child receives vaccination against polio in a Mother and Child Health (MCH) Clinic at Mukuru Health Centre, in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: ©UNICEFKENYA/2016/NOORANI

As long as there is a child out there who has contracted this disease, no matter where they live or who they are – all children everywhere are not safe. The four cases confirmed in October 2016 in the current polio outbreak in Nigeria place other African countries, including Kenya, at risk of importing the wild polio virus, due to the unaccounted number of unvaccinated children across the continent as well as the high population movement.

In the final push towards eradicating polio by 2018, Kenya with its strict monitoring system for the safety and quality assurance of vaccines, has already proved that it has the capacity to make the whole country polio-free. A five-day polio campaign that started on 18 January, 2017 targets more than 2.9 million children below the age of 5 years in the fifteen counties of Bungoma, Busia, Garissa, Isiolo, Lamu, Mandera, Marsabit, Nairobi, Samburu, Tana River, Trans Nzoia, Turkana, Wajir, West Pokot and Uasin Gishu. Children in high-risk areas — some of whom have never had access to immunization services before — will have an opportunity to be vaccinated against polio.

To ensure that all vulnerable children are reached, the exercise will be relying on the steadfast commitment of vaccination teams and the communities they serve. These heroic women and men in most cases walk long distances from house-to-house, often in the most dangerous of circumstances to reach all children. Communities where the polio campaign is backed and encouraged by religious and community leaders have much higher rates of protection than those that lack this support.

As part of the worldwide campaign to eradicate polio, there is need for everyone to rally behind this polio vaccination campaign, to reach each and every child regardless of their geographical location of their status in society. We have a responsibility to protect hundreds of thousands of children in Kenya from being paralyzed for life; from being excluded from their communities; and from being denied their right to a full and productive life.

In 2017 and beyond, no child in Kenya should suffer the consequences of a vaccine-preventable disease, for every child deserves to live in a polio-free world.

Excerpt:

A child receives an oral polio vaccine in Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Andy Hazel
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 30 2016 (IPS)

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.

To better reach these children the authors also looked at another metric: disease as a marker of inequality. Or, in the words of Robin Nandy, Principal Adviser and Chief of Immunisation at UNICEF, “a virus doesn’t lie”.

“The presence of disease is the best indicator of where a bigger problem is,” he explains. “Diseases tend to show up where there are weak systems of health coverage and in areas of conflict.”

“It is very likely that where there is low immunisation coverage there are multiple deprivations.”

“The nutritional status of the kids in these areas could be compromised, they could lack water or sanitation, common childhood illnesses such as diarrhoea or pneumonia could be present.”

Using data from 69 countries, the study examined inequality amongst rates of childhood immunisation and measured changes in rates of immunisation over the last ten years. The most prominent inequalities recorded were those of household economic status and the level of maternal education.

While the report showed that rates of immunisation for diseases such as measles, polio and yellow fever are around 85 percent globally, progressing beyond this number is hard and the biggest barrier to progress is political willpower.

“Once you’ve hit 80 percent the remaining 15 to 20 percent tend to be in remote locations, in underprivileged populations,” says Nandy. “In many countries the communities that want immunisation are marginalised. Political will is extremely important to shift the mindset from wide coverage to wide coverage with equality.”

“There are some areas that are right under our noses that we tend not to prioritise because we’re focused elsewhere, like urban slums. Often they don’t show up in population data and that is why they’re not prioritised in health services.”

Nandy points to a rapidly urbanising world and the growing population of children living in refugee camps or moving between regions as key examples of the complex operating environments. “There has to be a proactive and deliberate attempt to reach these populations and it won’t happen by delivering services in a normal way. We need tailored approaches for each country to make sure these populations are reached.”

Polio, which has neared complete eradication but setbacks in 2015-16, illustrates the difficulty of reaching children most in need.

“Where are we still seeing polio transmission?” Nandy asks rhetorically. “It’s on the Pakistan / Afghanistan border, places like Baluchistan and Waziristan, places that have security issues. These limit the access of health workers into that area.”

“You will get increases in rates of diseases like polio when parents cannot bring their kids to clinics.”

The current situation in many countries shows that further improvement is needed to lessen inequalities, and data such as this may prove invaluable.

A meeting session of the #BringBackOurGirls daily protest campaigners at Maitama Amusement Park, Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Credit: Ini Ekott/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 12 2016 (IPS)

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.

“Boko Haram’s horror continues to wreck the lives of millions and millions of people,” Lanzer told press.

The Lake Chad Basin comprises of over 30 million residents from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. While visiting Northeastern Nigeria, Lanzer saw rampant poverty and food insecurity in the region with villages that were “completely deserted, completely destroyed.”

Children especially bear the brunt of this insecurity.

According to the UN’s children agency (UNICEF), of the almost 3 million people displaced by Boko Haram-related insecurity, 1.3 million are children. This is one of the fastest growing displacement crises in Africa, UNICEF noted.

In its new report, the UN children’s agency found that the number of children with severe acute malnutrition spiked in one year from 149,000 to almost 200,000.

Youth also continue to face threats of kidnapping and recruitment.

With the second anniversary for the Chibok kidnappings soon approaching, the majority of the girls still remain missing. However, Lanzer noted that this is just one case.

“The plight of the girls who were taken…that is one awful example, in a litany of awful examples,” he said, adding that the those who have been taken by Boko Haram now number in the thousands.

As they continue to disappear from the Lake Chad Basin, children as young as eight years old are increasingly used in suicide attacks.

One out of every five suicide bombers deployed by the terrorist group has been a child and are mostly girls, UNICEF reported.

“To me, that’s the epitome of evil,” Lanzer told reporters at a press briefing. “I cannot think of anything more horrifying.”

The report found that 44 children were used in suicide attacks in 2015, a ten-fold increase from 2014. Cameroon had the highest number of attacks involving children, reflecting the increased spillover of violence in the region.

Many kidnapped girls also experience sexual violence and forced marriage. In one account, Cameroonian 17-year-old Khadija told UNICEF that she was kidnapped while visiting her mother in Nigeria and forced to marry to one of the group’s militants.

“’If you don’t marry us, we will kill you,’ they said. ‘I will not marry you, even if you kill me,’ I responded. Then they came for me at night. They kept me locked in a house for over a month and told me ‘whether you like it or not, we have already married you,’” she recalled.

For those who do return home, communities often shun them out of fear that they will turn against their families.

Khadija revealed the discrimination she faced after escaping Boko Haram and arriving at a displacement camp.

“Some women would beat me, they would chase me away. Everywhere I went, they would abuse me and call me a Boko Haram wife,” she said.

Lanzer urged for a broader engagement in the Lake Chad Basin to address not only short-term relief, but also long-term development and security challenges to help stabilise the situation.

“More can be done,” he said. “I know that every donor capital at the moment is stretched…but when I see the scale of destruction and the level of suffering that stared me at the face…I haven’t seen anything worse anywhere recently,” he concluded.

So far, UNICEF has only received 11 percent of its $97 million appeal to provide lifesaving assistance to families affected by Boko Haram violence in the Lake Chad Basin.

A small boy plays with his toys. Poor nutrition in Zimbabwe is exposing vulnerable children nutrition to mental health challenges according to humanitarian agencies. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

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.

Ndlovu, a 27-year-old single mother is raising two children, both under 5-years old, and survives on menial jobs such as doing laundry and dishes in neighbouring homes, says she has watched their health deteriorate and not just physically.

“I know they are not growing up the way other children are,” Ndlovu said, as she changed the underwear of her four-year who had just soiled himself.

“At his age, he should be able to visit the toilet by himself, yet I still have to change him,” she said from her one roomed shack in one of Bulawayo’s poor townships that litter the city’s north.

Ndlovu’s concerns about the slow development of her children point to the broader effects of Zimbabwe’s economic decline on vulnerable groups, with the UNICEF early this month releasing the Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas 2015 (http://unicef.org/zimbabwe/resources_17478.html) showing high poverty levels across the country that are affecting children’s mental health.

At the launch of the report, UNICEF, the World Bank and government officials said the poverty atlas is an attempt recognise that “Children are rarely recognised in poverty alleviation efforts and their needs are not properly addressed.”

According to the report, no child from the poorest health quintile reaches higher education, with eight of the country’s ten provinces registering poverty levels between 65 and 75 per cent.

“Child poverty has reduced (their) mental health and is reponsible for poverty when they are adults,” said Dr. Jane Muita, UNICEF’s deputy resident representative in Zimbabwe.

“It (child poverty) results in lower skills and productivity, lower levels of health and educational achievement,” Dr. Muita said.

According Zimbabwe’s health and child welfare, the country has witnessed an increase in mental health diagnoses, and has put in place a Mental Health Strategy 2014-18 to deal with the crisis.

The ministry blames the tough economic conditions that have thrown millions into the streets of unemployment.

There are no available figures of how mental health has affected children, but concerns by parents such as Ndlovu are giving a human face to a crisis that has been highlighted by the UNICEF report on child poverty and their mental health.

In some parts of Zimbabwe in the south-west districts such as Nkayi were found to have up to 95.6 per cent of poverty, while Lupane poverty levels stood at 93 per cent according to the UNICEF’s Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas.

There are concerns that this will slow the country’s march towards realising its Sustainable Development Goals to reduce child poverty by 2030.

Last year, the Zimbabwe Vulnerable Assessment Committee found that up to 36 per cent of children in Zimbabwe have stunted growth which experts say has not only affected them physically, but has also slowed their mental growth because of poor diets.

“The problem with children’s health and their mental development is that the attitude of both parents and some health workers is that these children will soon grow out of these challenges,” said Obias Nsamala, a Bulawayo pediatrician.

“But what I have seen with many children under 5 years is that these mental deficits can be detected when they come for treatment but only become an issue by the time they have began school. I think that is why for a long time this country had something like special classes for children not intellectually gifted,” Nsamala told IPS.

“I believe its been a wrong approach because some of these children may be slow learners or intellectually challenged not because of some genetic deficit but because all the signs were ignored earlier on based on their backgrounds and access to adequate meals,” he said.

As the country seeks to improve the lives of vulnerable groups such as children with government officials saying the country needs to grow the economy in order to reduce poverty, there is no consensus on how exactly this will be achieved to attract investment, with the country continuing to rely on international development partners to create safety nets for the poor.

From 2014 to June last year, UNICEF says it spent 363 million dollars on social services, this at time the country’s critical social services ministries are facing budget cuts which officials have admitted made it impossible to provide adequate assistance such as health care.

Under the 2016 national budget, the health and child welfare ministry received 330 million dollars which will largely be funded by donor countries, leaving a huge deficit which Minister David Parirenyatwa said is not enough to meet such such sectors as the poorly funded psychiatric clinics.

Perhaps to highlight these funding challenges, officials at the country’s largest psychiatric institution which caters for adults, Ingutsheni Hospital in Bulawayo early this year told Minister Parirenyatwa that the mental health hospital requires 23 doctors but only had six.

The social welfare ministry, also previously offering financial support for vulnerable group’s such Ndlovu’s children, has complained of poor funding from government.

Aid agencies say millions will require food assistance in 2016, further pushing Ndlovu and many others on the edge of what UNICEF’s Poverty Atlas says are their mental needs.

*name changed to protect her identity

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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.

The introduction of GMOs is seen by many as a measure to improve Cameroon’s agricultural yields and guarantee food security, despite health risks.

“Genetically modified organisms will help Cameroon solve many problems which researchers of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development have not been able to solve using conventional selection and cross breeding. It will definitely guarantee food security and safety,” Dr. David Akuroh Mbah, Chief Research Officer at the Cameroon Academy of Sciences, told IPS.

He says though Cameroon hasn’t begun using genetic engineering to modify food crops and livestock, “There are a good number of them which will be modified to increase yield. Some health problems will equally be solved. A lot of drugs and pharmaceutical products are produced by genetically modification of organisms, either plants or animals.”

According to Dr. Mbah, insulin which is required almost on a daily basis by a good proportion of the Cameroon population is now produced by use of bacteria and animals. “If it is done in Cameroon, it would be cheaper,” he said.

To further his point, Dr. Mbah cites examples such as the African swine fever, bird flu and a toxic element in cassava tubers which he says can all be eliminated through genetic modification.

“When we introduce this technology, we would be able to introduce genes that will eliminate the toxins in cassava which is currently being consumed heavily by a majority of Cameroonians. Genetic modification has been developed to eliminate the spread of bird flu virus among humans, while increasing the production of chickens. GMO chickens are more resistant to the virus. A technique has also been discovered to make pigs immune to the African swine fever virus, but this is only done out of Cameroon for now,” he said.

The country held its first national forum on GMOS from September 8 to 10, 2015 bringing together biotechnologists, academics, government officials, businessmen and experts from research institutions to brainstorm and pave the way for an effective introduction of use of bioengineering in the country’s agro sector.

Emmanuel Mbonde, the country’s Minister of Mines, Industry and Technological Development says that participants’ contributions to the forum will later on enable the government to take needed measures to guarantee the security of its economic, social, cultural and environmental space and to make prudent decisions in the face of challenges of modern biotechnology.

A 2014 report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, (ISAAA), shows Cameroon is among seven African countries (which include Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Egypt) engaged in test cultivation of GMOs.

Dr. Mbah says besides the forum, Cameroon had already adopted a law in 2003, to control modern biotechnology, genetic engineering or DNA technology and cloning.

“Now that the text of the application for the law has been signed, a National Biosafety Committee has been set up to guide the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development on what type of biotechnology to authorize or prohibit.”

The Cameroon Academy of Science and the National Biosafety Committee would examine applications of private companies vying to use GMOs in Cameroon’s agriculture and livestock sectors.

Cameroon is currently testing the use of GMOs on cotton in three localities in the northern part of the country. The first phase of the testing was carried out in 2012, unannounced to the public. According to Celestin Klassou, a researcher at Cameroon Cotton Development Corporation, cotton produced during the first phase was resistant to pest and disease, and produced higher yields.

“There is a gene which is genetically engineered into the cotton. It is an experimental stage being carried out by the Cameroon Cotton Development Corporation in accordance with the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the Cameroon law,” said Dr. Mbah.

He equally notes that the same procedure would be used to improve agricultural production, adding that “people who are protesting against this system have insufficient information. We would not import GMOs from abroad. We will develop them here. However, there is a law which obliges traders to label products in shops so that citizens can choose freely between GMOs and natural products.”

Dr. Mbah also told IPS GMOs would be introduced widely in Cameroon if the three-year-long second phase which is on-going in three localities in the northern region is successful. The cotton corporation also produces edible cotton oil for commercialization.

Professor Vincent Titanji, a Cameroonian biotechnologist and Vice Chancellor of the Cameroon Christian University Institute, reaffirms that the benefits of GMOs are greater than any negative affects they might have in future.

“Remember that fire was discovered. It is both useful and harmful. ICTs are the same. I have been in the domain of bioengineering for over 30 years and none of the predicted effects have materialized. It was predicted that weeds will invade the entire ecosystems of countries like Brazil, the US, South Africa and China which produce GMOs massively. Even the toxic substances predicted, have not materialized,” said Proffessor Titanji.

The bio-technician urges Cameroonians to embrace the technology and master it, in order to be able to make the best out of it, and to effectively and efficiently handle any effects which may come up in future.

He says GMOs have been used on crops like maize, soya beans, sorghum, rice and cotton and that the trials on cotton in the north of Cameroon have proven to be better yielding and resistant to pest.“One or two negative effects such as a possible allergy should not scare people away from biotechnology.

Samson Tetang, Coordinator of a Cameroon-based NGO, Sustainable Society International says GMOs are needed for the development of agriculture and livestock. He however insists there must be a mechanism for bio-surveillance put in place to follow the risks. “Food shortage can be fought through the use of GMOs, but serious health hazards could be registered if no one monitors the plants and animals,”he said.

Marcel Moukend, an agro-engineer in charge of a National Support Program for Maize producers at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development tells IPS that the introduction of GMOs in Cameroon is not an emergency solution to food crisis.

He argues that there are programs at the Ministry of Agriculture which can guarantee food security.

“In our program, farmers only need to show us their land and we provide maize seeds to them free of charge. We provide natural composite seeds which yield between five to six tons per hectare and imported improved hybrid seeds which yield between eight to ten tons per hectare. There are programs for other crops,” he argued.

Some of the programs, such as a national program to strengthen solanum potato sub sector, was introduced in 2008.

The program aimed at helping farmers increase and maintain a high quality production of solanum potatoes only went functional this year and was effective, according to reports from the agriculture ministry.

The program targets 250,000 farming families in the West, North West, Adamawa, Far North and South West regions of Cameroon.

The Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development launched 9 billion FCFA-worth agricultural programs this year, the programs dubbed, ‘Agropoles’, cover 17 projects which include the production of avocados, rice, pork, soya-bean oil as well as chicken in the Center, West, South, North and Littoral regions.

Emmanuel Mbom, Monitoring Officer at Counterpart International, told IPS that figures from the National Institute of Statistics show Cameroon is a food deficient country where one third of children under the age of five suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Mbom whose NGO is implementing a U.S government sponsored program which provides food to some 74,000 school children in underprivileged regions of Cameroon, insists yearly food shortages are growing and represent a threat to children and their communities.

In relation to the use of GMOs, to fight hunger and poverty in Africa, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which once owned shares in Monsanto, a top GMO producer, states in its annual letter African farmers could theoretically double their yields using new farming innovations such as the use of high yielding seeds resistant to droughts and disease.

It adds that “With the right investments, we can deliver innovation and information to enough farmers in Africa to increase productivity by 50 per cent for the continent overall.”

UNICEF says hunger is a great problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Cameroon is found, despite the fact that the region is home to abundant cultivatable land. It says 70 per cent of the population in the region practice farming but ironically the prevalence of hunger is highest in the world with one in five people underfed. Forty per cent of children under the age of five (25 million children) suffer from stunted growth due to malnutrition.

But in the face of these nutrition problems, some conservatives and civil society activists in Cameroon still believe traditional methods of farming used over the years can be a solution.

Joshua Konkankoh, founder of the Better World Cameroon NGO tells IPS “GMOs account for a great deal to the loss of food sovereignty in Africa and in no way can become a solution.”

He shares the school of thought that the introduction of GMOs is an initiative of private seed companies to kill off Africa’s seed systems. He equally believes GMOs threaten the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers who rely on recycling seed for their livelihoods.

During the opening of Cameroon’s first national forum on GMOs in September 2015, civil society leaders stormed the venue of the meeting with placards.

Led by Bernard Njonga, a politician and former president of a farmers association, l’Association Citoyenne de Défense des Interest Collectives, (in French) they carried messages suggesting GMOs are cancerous herbicides and a threat to small scale farmers. Dr. Mbah however dismissed their claims, saying that they are not scientific and emanate from baseless presumptions.

While the debate on the introduction of GMOs in Cameroon is still going on with researchers urging farmers to dialogue with experts and understand the initiative before jumping to unscientific conclusions, a study by Dr. Wilfred Mbatcham, a biotechnology researcher, reveals 25 per cent of imported goods in Cameroon contain GMOs.

The Chief Research Officer at the Cameroon Academy of Sciences tells IPS that the National Biosafety Committee is yet to confirm such reports and identify importers of these products.

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Laboratory Technician, Herbert Mtopa collects biological samples at a clinic in Zimbabwe's Shamva District under a CultiAF project to assess exposure of women and children to aflatoxins. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, Nov 20 2015 (IPS)

Aflatoxin contamination is a growing threat to trade, food and health security in sub-Saharan Africa, where smallholder farmers are challenged by food production and now climate change, researchers said.

Aflatoxins are toxic and cancer causing poisons produced by certain green mould fungus that naturally occurs in the soil. The poisons have become a serious contaminant of staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa including maize, cassava, sorghum, yam, rice, groundnut and cashews.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), an international not for profit organisation based in Nigeria has led pioneering research in reducing mycotoxin contamination in Africa through rolling out innovative approaches.

According to IITA researchers, exposure to mycotoxins is an important constraint to improving the health and well-being of people in Africa where high levels of aflatoxin contamination have been confirmed. Many smallholder farmers fail to prevent contamination during production and storage of their crops because they lack cost-effective ways to determine the poisons.

Sub-Saharan Africa is annually losing more than 450 million dollars in trade revenue of major staples, particularly maize, and groundnuts as a result of contamination from aflatoxins, researchers told IPS. The health bill as a result of people unknowingly eating contaminated food runs into millions of dollars in a region with over burdened health facilities.

Africa is at risk of toxins which are linked to suppressed immunity, liver cancer in humans and stunting in children. UNICEF says 40 per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa are stunted or have low height for their age which can be associated with impaired brain development.

Researchers say high temperatures and drought conditions favour the growth of fungus, while poor farming practises and food insecurity status of many people in sub-Saharan Africa increase their exposure to aflatoxin contamination. In addition high soil moisture content at harvest attributed to off-season rains as a result of climate variability increases contamination.

“Climate change is indeed predicted to have a profound effect on aflatoxin contamination of food and feed crops,” said Joao, adding that, “Consequently, any reduction in precipitation level or increment in temperature is expected to make aflatoxin problem more acute.”

In 2009, the IITA, the African Agriculture Technology Foundation (AATF), United States Department of Agriculture –Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) and other partners developed an indigenous biological control technology, named AflaSafe to mitigate aflatoxin contamination in maize and groundnuts.

Aflasafe is a mixture of four non-aflatoxin producing strains of the green mould fungus (Aspergilllus flavus) of native origin. The formulated Aflasafe product is then broadcast in the field where it grows and prevents the toxin producing strains from colonizing, multiplying and contaminating crops.

Focused aflatoxin biocontrol research in Africa first started in Nigeria where Aflasafe is today a fully registered commercial product. Country specific products have been developed and introduced in Kenya, Burkina Faso, Senegal, The Gambia and Zambia.

In all the six countries where the bio control products have been tested since 2008 to date, IITA said farmers have consistently achieved up to 99 per cent reduction in aflatoxin contamination by using Aflasafe in maize and groundnut fields.

“The benefits attributed to using the Aflasafe bio control product for mitigating aflatoxin contamination far outweighs its cost,” said Juliet Akello, a plant pathologist and member of the IITA team in Zambia under Aflatoxin Biocontrol. “Exposure to aflatoxin through consumption of contaminated foods is a combination of unawareness, poverty and poor enforcement of standards by governments.”

Globally aflatoxins are a known threat that have been reduced thanks to investment in food safely controls. Smallholder farmers in Africa rely on a combination of traditional storage methods and use of pesticides to prevent weevils. However, these methods are not always pest proof leading to them losing a bulk of the stored crop by the time they need it most.

Other innovative approaches are being tried in Africa to curbing pre and post harvest losses in addition to eliminating aflatoxin contamination using Aflasafe.

In Zimbabwe, researchers at the University of Zimbabwe and Action Contre la Faim are working with communities in two districts to investigate whether improved storage can reduce aflatoxin contamination in local maize grain. The two-year research, supported by the Cultivate Africa’s Future (CultiAF) programme, an initiative funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IRDC) and the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research, will also assess levels of exposure suffered by women and infants. The project has introduced a metal silos and thick plastic “super bags,” allowing maize to be stored in air-tight conditions.

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are challenged by lack of drying equipment, with most maize and groundnut farmers keeping their crops in fields to dry out before harvest. Sometimes, they store it before it has dried properly, making it vulnerable to aflatoxin attack.

Exports of agricultural commodities particularly peanuts from Africa have declined by as much as 20 per cent over the past two decades. The commodities have been rejected after failing to meet the European Union’s market regulations on aflatoxin levels in foods for human consumption, a serious hurdle to international trade.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, only 15 African countries had regulatory limits for aflatoxins by 2013.

In Zambia, for example, nearly 100 per cent of the peanut butter brands sampled between 2012 and 2014 from supermarkets and local markets were found to contain unsafe levels of aflatoxins above 20ppb. Less than 30 per cent of milled groundnut flour collected from markets and homesteads had levels within the 4 ppb set by the EU as safe limits.

While in Kenya, considered the number one aflatoxin hotspot in East Africa, nearly 200 died due to acute aflatoxicosis after eating aflatoxin contaminated maize between 2004 and 2006. About 2 million maize bags were found unfit for human consumption due to high levels of aflatoxins in 2010.

IITA’s programme manager for Aflasafe in Malawi, Dr. Joseph Atehnkeng, said between 40 and 100 per cent of groundnut based-commodities in Malawi, were found to contain unsafe toxin levels.

Former net groundnut exporters; Mozambique, Senegal, The Gambia, Zambia and Malawi have lost lucrative markers in the EU, the United States and South Africa because of high aflatoxin levels in their commodities, says IITA scientist and plant pathologist, Dr. Joao Augusto.

Mozambique has since the late 70s, recorded a high prevalence of liver cancer in the southern part of the country which has been associated with consumption of aflatoxin contaminated food, especially groundnuts.

According to the Partnership for Aflatoxin Control (PACA), a regional project formed in 2009 to minimise and ultimately eradicate aflatoxins using proven and innovative strategies, there is a need for effective aflatoxin regulation policies and country-specific standards.

Researcher, Chapwa Kasoma from Zambia, warns that left unchecked, aflatoxin contamination could retard development in sub-Saharan Africa.

“If we want to overcome poverty in all its forms; combating not only the inadequacy of food but also addressing any forms of malnutrition we need to be worried,” Chapwa, also a field supervisor with Pioneer DuPont, told IPS. “Being potent carcinogens, aflatoxins are clearly a nutrition problem.”

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By Geeta Rao Gupta
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 2015 (IPS)

The new Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon recently by the member states of the United Nations, are all interconnected, as has been reiterated time and again. However, it is in the new Goal 6 – “Ensure access to water and sanitation for all”—for which this interconnectedness is most apparent.

Geeta Rao Gupta

Water flows throughout the 2030 Development Agenda. And sanitation and hygiene underpin any possible gains from access to water.

If we do not reach Goal 6, the other goals and targets will not be reached. Progress in the areas of education, health, inequality and extreme poverty all depends on how well we do on water and sanitation.

The United Nations some years ago declared that access to water and sanitation is a basic human right. However today, 663 million people are without access to adequate drinking water and 2.4 billion lack adequate toilets.

We at UNICEF are particularly concerned about the children, who are disproportionately affected by the lack of access to these basic needs.

It affects their health. Water and sanitation related diseases are one of the leading causes of death in children under five. Without access to sanitation hundreds of them fall ill and die every single day from preventable causes, particularly diarrhoea and other fecal-oral diseases.

It affects their education. In many communities, girls stay out of school because they need to fetch water; because they do not have a safe space to use when they menstruate; because they must help their mothers care for those who are sick – often from water-borne diseases.

It affects their nutritional status and their development. There is emerging evidence of direct linkages between lack of access to water and sanitation, and chronic malnutrition. Around 159 million children worldwide are stunted (short height for age), a condition which causes irreversible physical and cognitive damage. The repercussions of stunting can be felt beyond the individual child. It can significantly diminish the learning and future earning potential of entire generations, and thus negatively affect the local and national economy.

It affects equality and equity. One important aim in the new SDGs is the goal to reduce inequalities. New evidence from the World Bank shows that investing in water and sanitation for the poorest 20 per cent of a population yields greater economic returns than investing in the other quintiles and thus has the potential to reduce societal inequalities.

Our data from 45 developing countries show that in 7 out of 10 households, the burden of collecting water falls to women and girls, so access would also aid gender equity.

A side event in the margins of the UN General Assembly, hosted by the governments of the Netherlands, South Africa, Hungary and Bangladesh, concluded that targeting the poorest and the most marginalized will require an immense mind-shift for governments. But it must be done.

It cannot be done without strengthening institutions and improving the accountability of governments and service providers. And it will not be done without involving those who have the most at stake – the poor, women, and adolescents – in planning and in monitoring of services. Their influence has already been brought to bear in the drafting of Goal 6, the fastest agreed-upon goal.

It is no coincidence that impressive results are achieved by working closely with those directly affected. Partnership with them is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but a must-have.

In short, access to water and sanitation is not only a matter of dignity and human rights, but fundamental to our ability to attain any of the goals the governments of the world have just adopted.

We must start right away on working on Goal 6, and it can’t be business as usual: we need to start with the most disadvantaged, or we risk losing the gains we have so painstakingly made in the last 15 years, and we endanger the future. There is no time to waste.

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Excerpt:

The conflict in Syria has destroyed much of the country’s water infrastructure, leaving five million people suffering from a critical water shortage. Credit: Bigstock

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

Imagine having to venture out into a conflict zone in search of water because rebel groups and government forces have targeted the pipelines. Imagine walking miles in the blazing summer heat, then waiting hours at a public tap to fill up your containers. Now imagine realizing the jugs are too heavy to carry back home.

This scene, witnessed by an engineer with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is becoming all too common in embattled Syria. In this case, the child sent to fetch water was a little girl who simply sat down and cried when it became clear she wouldn’t be able to get the precious resource back to her family.

Compounded by a blistering heat wave, with temperatures touching a searing 40 degrees Celsius in the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s water shortage is reaching critical levels, the United Nations said Wednesday.

In an Aug. 26 press relief, UNICEF blasted parties to the conflict for deliberately targeting the water supply, adding that it has recorded 18 intentional water cuts in Aleppo in 2015 alone.

Such a move – banned under international law – is worsening the misery of millions of war-weary civilians, with an estimated five million people enduring the impacts of long interruptions to their water supply in the past few months.

“Clean water is both a basic need and a fundamental right, in Syria as it is anywhere else,” Peter Salama, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement today. “Denying civilians access to water is a flagrant violation of the laws of war and must end.”

In some communities taps have remained dry for up to 17 consecutive days; in others, the dry spell has lasted over a month.

Often times the task of fetching water from collection points or public taps falls to children. It is not only exhausting work, but exceedingly dangerous in the conflict-ridden country. UNICEF says that three children have died in Aleppo in recent weeks while they were out in search of water.

In cities like Aleppo and Damascus, as well as the southwestern city of Dera’a, families are forced to consume water from unprotected and unregulated groundwater sources. Most likely contaminated, these sources put children at risk of water-borne diseases like typhoid and diarrhoea.

With supply running so low and demand for water increasing by the day, water prices have shot up – by 3,000 percent in places like Aleppo – making it even harder for families to secure this life-sustaining resource.

Ground fighting and air raids have laid waste much of the country’s water infrastructure, destroying pumping stations and severing pipelines at a time when municipal workers cannot get in to make necessary repairs.

To top it off, the all-too-frequent power cuts prevent technicians and engineers from pumping water into civilian areas.

UNICEF has trucked in water for over half-a-million people, 400,000 of them in Aleppo. The agency has also rehabilitated 94 wells serving 470,000 people and distributed 300,000 litres of fuel to beef up public water distribution systems in Aleppo and Damascus, where the shortage has impacted 2.3 million and 2.5 million people respectively. In Dera’a, a quarter of a million people are also enduring the cuts.

A 40-billion-dollar funding gap is preventing UNICEF from revving up its water, hygiene and sanitation operations around Syria. To tackle the crisis in Aleppo and Damascus alone the relief agency says it urgently needs 20 million dollars – a request that is unlikely to be met given the funding shortfall gripping humanitarian operations across the U.N. system.

Overall, water availability in Syria is about half what it was before 2011, when a massive protest movement against President Bashar al-Assad quickly turned into a violent insurrection that now involves over four separate armed groups including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Well into its fifth year, the war shows no sign of abating.

As the U.N. marks World Water Week (Aug. 23-28) its eyes are on the warring parties in Syria who must be held accountable for using water to achieve their military and political goals.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (left) meets with Muhammadu Buhari, President of Nigeria. UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

With over 1.5 million displaced, 800,000 of whom are children, and continuously escalating violence in northeastern Nigeria, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the humanitarian situation as “particularly worrying” during a visit to the country.

Speaking at a press conference on Aug. 24 following a meeting with newly-elected Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Ban expressed concern over the “troubling” violence perpetrated by armed extremist group Boko Haram and its impact on civilians.

In an impact assessment report released in April 2015 on the conflict in Nigeria, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that in 2014 alone, more than 7,300 people have been killed at the hands of Boko Haram.

As a result of the conflict, access to health services, safe water, and sanitation is extremely limited in northeastern Nigeria. UNICEF found that less than 40 percent of health facilities are operational in the conflict-stricken region, increasing the risk of malaria, measles, and diarrhoea.

Malnutrition rates have soared in northern Nigeria, accounting for approximately 36 percent of malnourished children under five across the entire Sahel region.

UNICEF also reported that women and children are deliberately targeted and abducted in mass numbers for physical and sexual assault, slavery, and forced marriages.

Ban reiterated these findings during a dialogue on democracy, human rights, development, climate change, and countering violent extremism in Abuja on Aug. 24, marking the 500^th day of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping.

“I am appealing as U.N. Secretary-General and personally as a father and grandfather. Think about your own daughters. How would you feel if your daughters and sisters were abducted by others?” said Ban while calling for the girls’ unconditional release.

Though the Chibok kidnapping was by far Boko Haram’s largest abduction, Human Rights Watch reported in its 2015 World Report on Nigeria that the extremist group has abducted more than 500 women and girls since 2009.

Amnesty International has also reported brutal “acts which constitute crimes under international law” committed by Nigerian government forces, including the abuse, torture, and extrajudicial killings of detainees. In one case, the national armed forces rounded up a group of 35 men “seemingly at random” and beat them publicly. The men were detained and returned to the community six days later, where military personnel “shot them dead, several at a time, before dumping their bodies.”

Corruption has also been a serious problem within the police force and the government. The International Crisis Group stated that the country has lost more than 400 billion dollars to large-scale corruption since independence in 1960.

“The most effective way to root out this disease is a transparent, fair, and independent process to address corruption in a comprehensive way,” said Ban in his keynote address to the dialogue.

The U.N. chief also stressed on the importance of collaboration in addressing such violent crimes and in alleviating the humanitarian situation, announcing increased humanitarian operations and the provision of training for military operations.

But he dismissed the sole use of military force, stating: “Weapons may kill terrorists. But good governance will kill terrorism.”

Since Boko Haram’s radicalization in 2009, at least 15,000 people have been killed.

The group is opposed to secular authority and seeks to implement Sharia law in northern Nigeria, where widespread poverty and marginalization may also have been contributing factors to the extremists’ rise.

According to Nigeria’s Millennium Development Goals Report, the north has the highest absolute poverty rate in the country, with approximately 66 percent of people living on less than a dollar a day, compared to 55 percent in the south.

In fact, in an April New York Times op-ed, Buhari stated that countering Boko Haram will not only require increased military operations, but also increased attention to social issues such as poverty and education.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Children residing at a Protection of Civilians (POC) site run by the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) perform at a special cultural event in Juba March 27, 2015. Credit: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2015 (IPS)

The rising death toll of civilians, specifically women and children, in ongoing military conflicts is generating strong messages of condemnation from international institutions and human rights organisations – with the United Nations remaining helpless as killings keep multiplying.

The worst offenders are warring parties in “the world’s five most conflicted countries”, namely Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR), and most horrifically, Yemen, where civilian casualties have been rising almost by the hour.According to UNICEF, there have not been this many child refugees since the end of the Second World War.

The 1949 Geneva Convention, which governs the basic rules of war, has also continued to be violated in conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, Gaza, Nigeria, Myanmar, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), among other military hotspots.

The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, says some 230 million children grow up caught in the middle of conflicts, involving both governments and “terror groups” such as Boko Haram, Islamic State (IS), and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

According to a new report by UNICEF, one of the worst cases is Yemen where an average of eight children are being killed or maimed every day.

The study, titled Yemen: Childhood Under Threat, says nearly 400 children have been killed and over 600 others injured since the violence escalated about four months ago.

In the conflict in Gaza last year, according to U.N. statistics, more than 2,100 were killed, including 1,462 civilians. And the civilian killings included 495 children and 253 women compared with the death toll of 72 Israelis, including seven civilians.

Addressing the Security Council during an open debate on children and armed conflict last month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said there was “a moral imperative and a legal obligation” to protect children — and they should “never be jeopardized by national interests.”

He said 2014 was one of the worst years in recent memory for children in countries devastated by military conflicts.

The conflict in Yemen is a particular tragedy for children, says UNICEF Representative in Yemen, Julien Harneis. “Children are being killed by bombs or bullets and those that survive face the growing threat of disease and malnutrition. This cannot be allowed to continue,” he added.

As devastating as the conflict is for the lives of children right now, says the UNICEF report, “it will have terrifying consequences for their future.”

Across the country, nearly 10 million children – 80 per cent of the country’s under-18 population – are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. More than 1.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes, the report said.

The New York office of the Tokyo-based Arigatou International, which has taken a lead role in protecting children at the grassroots level, is hosting a forum on “Religious Ideals and Reality: Responsibility of Leadership to Prevent Violence against Children,” in Geneva next week.

The forum is being co-hosted by ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), a global network dedicated to protecting children.

Rebeca Rios-Kohn, director of the Arigatou International New York Office, told IPS interfaith dialogue can play a critical role in bringing about behavioural change in areas of the world affected by armed conflicts.

“Religious leaders who have strong moral authority and credibility can influence positive change,” she added.

She pointed out the example of “corridors of peace” promoted by UNICEF which allowed vaccination of children to take place in conflict areas.

“However, while this is an important and tragic issue which receives great attention by the media, we must not forget that the issue of violence is global and affects many more children within the home, school and community, as well as orphanages, detention centres and other institutions where children are residing.”

Also, she said, the phenomenon of online exploitation of children, which will be addressed at the Forum, is a huge problem that has the attention of experts including Interpol due to its growing magnitude and the fact that the perpetrators can get away with it so easily.

“In other words, the work that we are doing focuses more on the broader dimensions of the problem,” she noted.

“We collaborate closely with the Global Network of Religions for Children (GNRC), another Arigatou Initiative that is led from Nairobi.”

Together, she said, the initiatives draw on the religious teachings and values of all major religions and on the power of prayer, meditation and diverse forms of worship to mobilise concrete actions for children.

Jo Becker, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, points out that children’s education has also suffered, as armed forces or groups damaged or destroyed more than 1,000 schools around the globe last year.

The most affected schools were in Palestine, where Israeli airstrikes and shelling damaged or destroyed 543 schools in Gaza, and Nigeria, where the Islamist armed group Boko Haram carried out attacks on 338 schools, including the abduction of 276 girls from their school in Chibok, Borno, in April 2014.

The result: hundreds of thousands of children are denied an education, she said.

According to UNICEF, there have not been this many child refugees since the end of the Second World War.

Meanwhile, the UNICEF report outlines the different dimensions of the crisis facing children in Yemen including:

At least 398 children killed and 605 injured as a result since the conflict escalated in March.

Children recruited or used in the conflict has more than doubled – from 156 in 2014 to 377 so far verified in 2015; 15.2 million people lack access to basic health care, with 900 health facilities closed since March 26; and 1.8 million children are likely to suffer from some form of malnutrition by the end of the year.

Additionally, 20.4 million people are in need of assistance to establish or maintain access to safe water and sanitation due to fuel shortages, infrastructure damage and insecurity, and nearly 3,600 schools have closed down, affecting over 1.8 million children.

Over the past six months, the children’s agency has provided psychological support to help over 150,000 children cope with the horrors of the conflict. Some 280,000 people have learnt how to avoid injury from unexploded ordnances and mines.

Yet despite the tremendous needs, UNICEF says its response remains grossly underfunded.

With only 16 per cent of the agency’s funding appeal of 182.6 million dollars met so far, “Yemen is one of the most under-funded of the different emergencies UNICEF is currently responding to around the world.”

“We urgently need funds so we can reach children in desperate need,” said Harneis. “We cannot stand by and let children suffer the consequences of a humanitarian catastrophe.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The 15-member Security Council discusses the security situation in Yemen on Aug. 20, 2015, at the United Nation’s headquarters in New York. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2015 (IPS)

With a staggering four in five Yemenis now in need of immediate humanitarian aid, 1.5 million people displaced and a death toll that has surpassed 4,000 in just five months, a United Nations official told the Security Council Wednesday that the scale of human suffering is “almost incomprehensible”.

Briefing the 15-member body upon his return from the embattled Arab nation on Aug. 19, Under-Secretary-General for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien stressed that the civilian population is bearing the brunt of the conflict and warned that unless warring parties came to the negotiating table there would soon be “nothing left to fight for”.

An August assessment report by Save the Children-Yemen on the humanitarian situation in the country of 26 million noted that over 21 million people, or 80 percent of the population, require urgent relief in the form of food, fuel, medicines, sanitation and shelter.

The health sector is on the verge of collapse, and the threat of famine looms large, with an estimated 12 million people facing “critical levels of food insecurity”, the organisation said.

In a sign of what O’Brien denounced as a blatant “disregard for human life” by all sides in the conflict, children have paid a heavy price for the fighting: 400 kids have lost their lives, while 600 of the estimated 22,000 wounded are children.

Aid groups say Monday’s bombing of the Houthi rebel-controlled Red Sea port by Saudi military jets has greatly worsened the risk of continued suffering, since the port served as the main entry point for shipments of humanitarian supplies.

In a statement published shortly after the airstrikes, Edward Santiago, Save the Children’s Country Director for Yemen, said, “We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage at Hodeida but we can’t lose a day; time is running out for Yemen’s children who are already at risk of starvation, disease, and abuse.”

He said there are already 5.9 million children going hungry, 624,000 displaced and about 7.3 million sick and wounded kids who are not receiving medical attention.

Even as civilians’ needs multiply, funding for the humanitarian response remains slow.

U.N. agencies say they have only received 282 million dollars for the response plan, just 18 percent of the 1.6-billion-dollar sum requested. Even if Saudi Arabia makes good on its pledge of 274 million dollars it will only bring funding up to 33 percent of the total required to adequately meet the crisis.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Wednesday its operations, too, are “grossly underfunded”; the agency has received just 16 percent of an urgent 182.6-million-dollar funding appeal.

The scale and rapid escalation of the conflict has much of the international community stunned. President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Peter Maurer, said after a three-day visit to Yemen earlier this month that he was “appalled” by the situation for civilians, which is “nothing short of catastrophic”.

Having witnessed the destruction first-hand he added in a press interview on Aug. 19, “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.”

O’Brien described the southern port city of Aden as a “shattered” metropolis, “where unexploded ordnance litter the streets and buildings”; while the city of Sana’a is pock-marked with craters left by airstrikes.

While humanitarian groups struggle to provide life-saving supplies, human rights watchdogs say the combination of Saudi-coalition-led airstrikes from above and fighting between pro- and anti Houthi armed groups on the ground have put civilians in an impossible situation.

A new Amnesty International report documenting what the organisation calls a “gruesome and bloody trail of death and destruction” suggests that unlawful attacks by all parties may amount to war crimes.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Schoolgirls play with each other in Gaza. Scores of Palestinian children and refugees are dependent on the international humanitarian community for their education needs. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2015 (IPS)

Overcoming a serious funding shortfall, and caught between numerous regional conflicts, the United Nation’s humanitarian agency for Palestinian refugees announced on Aug. 19 that it would nevertheless open schools on time for the roughly half-a-million children who rely on the international community for their education.

In a statement released today, the cash-strapped U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) promised to start the school year on schedule, allowing over 500,000 kids in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to return to their classrooms between Aug. 24 and Sept. 13.

Established in 1949 to address the needs of some five million Palestinian refugees, UNRWA runs 685 schools across Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring Arab countries.

“It is on the benches and behind the desks of UNRWA classrooms that millions of Palestine refugees, deprived for so long of a just and lasting solution, have built the capabilities and shaped the determination that enabled them to become actors of their own destinies,” the agency said in a press release issued Wednesday.

For months both UNRWA and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have stressed the importance of uninterrupted schooling for Palestinian refugees, and warned of the risks of allowing a generation of young people to be forgotten.

Congratulating UNRWA on its tireless efforts, Ban said in a statement Wednesday, “This achievement cannot be underestimated at a time of rising extremism in one of the world’s most unstable regions”, adding: “[For Palestine refugees] education is a passport to dignity. We must stand by them and the agency that serves them.”

Ban thanked member states for their contributions to UNRWA’s coffers, which include a 19-million-dollar contribution from Saudi Arabia and 15 million dollars each from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

To date, the agency has received contributions amounting to 78.9 billion dollars, or just over 75 percent of the 101-million-dollar deficit. The money will go towards fulfilling UNRWA’s mandate of providing health care, relief and social services, camp improvement and education.

Numerous obstacles stand between Palestinian children and their classrooms. In documenting some of these challenges, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) lists such issues as military incursions; demolitions of schools buildings; restrictions on movement or limited access to school premises; and damage and destruction of school property.

A 2013 UNICEF report entitled Education Under Occupation revealed that 38 schools serving approximately 3,000 children in Area C of the West Bank and East Jerusalem “have been issued either verbal and/or written stop-work or demolition orders by the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA).”

In the 2011-2012 period, UNICEF recorded 63 instances of “denial of access” to education in the Occupied Territories, which affected over 34,000 Palestinian students.

During the seven-week-long conflict in Gaza last summer some 327 schools were partially or completely obliterated, according to a 2015 UNICEF update, stripping thousands of kids of their only protective environment.

The situation is even more precarious for Palestinian refugees, who are often closer to the frontlines of conflict and thereby face greater risks in their quest to gain a decent education.

For instance in the besieged Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, home to an estimated 16,000 Palestinians, all 28 schools have been closed and the only education opportunities exist in the form of informal classes conducted by volunteer teachers in 10 “safe spaces”, according to a report by the Guardian.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A nurse at Redemption Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia explains the facility's options for family planning. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

Liberia’s Ebola epidemic may have subsided but its after-effects are still being felt, with tens of thousands of infants going unregistered at birth, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF says.

Liberia had ranked second after Somalia among countries with the lowest levels of birth registration. But just before the Ebola outbreak, progress had been made in reversing this problem, which leaves children at risk of exploitation and raises hurdles to entering the school system.

In July 2010, a decentralised birth registration system was launched by the government, with support from UNICEF, PLAN Liberia, Crisis Management Initiative and other development partners.

In 2013, the births of 79,000 children were registered, representing about a quarter of all new births and a dramatic increase from the four percent in previous years.

But by 2014, when many health facilities had closed or had reduced services due to the Ebola response, the number of registrations fell to 48,000 – a 39 per cent decrease.

And just 700 children are reported to have had their births registered between January and May 2015.

“Children who have not been registered at birth officially don’t exist,” said Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s Representative in Liberia. “Without citizenship, children in Liberia, who have already experienced terrible suffering because of Ebola, risk marginalization because they may be unable to access basic health and social services, obtain identity documents, and will be in danger of being trafficked or illegally adopted.”

The neighbouring countries of Guinea and Sierra Leone were also hit by the deadly virus, which weakened already fragile health systems. But in Sierra Leone, approximately 250,000 children were registered during a recent five-day birth registration and polio vaccination campaign.

UNICEF is now working to register nearly 70,000 Liberian children who weren’t registered during the outbreak.

The agency is supporting the revamp of the registration systems, and will assist with training, logistics, and outreach efforts prior to a planned nationwide campaign later this year, with the aim of reaching all children not registered in 2014 and 2015.

“No child should suffer the indignity, or not have protection from a state or other entities, and be unable to access basic services that are every child’s right just because of a lack of a registered identity,” says Yett. “We cannot, and should never let that happen.”

Altogether, more than 4,800 people died during Liberia’s Ebola outbreak, nearly half of all diagnosed cases. The country was still recovering from a devastating civil war that ended in 2003, and the virus proved especially deadly for health care workers.

According to the World Health Organization, they were 20-30 times more likely to contract the disease than the general public, given the number of patients they saw and treated.  More than 800 contracted Ebola, and more than 400 died, with the outcome of almost one quarter of the cases unknown – this in a country with just 50 doctors.

“Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone entered the Ebola epidemic with severely underfunded health systems,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “After a year of handling far too many severely ill patients, the surviving staff need support, better protection, compensation, and reinforcements. The existing facilities need a complete overhaul, and many new structures need to be built. If another outbreak strikes, the toll would be far worse.”

Edited by Thalif Deen

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has trebled the volume of emergency supplies trucked into Syria from 800,000 to 2.5 million litres of water a day. Credit: Bigstock

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 24 2015 (IPS)

Caught in the grips of a summer heat-wave, in a season that is seeing record-high temperatures worldwide, residents of the war-torn city of Aleppo in northern Syria are facing off against yet another enemy: thirst.

The conflict that began in 2011 as a popular uprising against the reign of Bashar al-Assad is now well into its fifth year with no apparent sign of let-up in the fighting between multiple armed groups – including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Caught in the middle, Syria’s civilians have paid the price, with millions forced to flee the country en masse. Those left inside are living something of a perpetual nightmare, made worse earlier this month by an interruption in water supplies.

While some services have since been restored, the situation is still very precarious and international health agencies are stepping up efforts in a bid to stave off epidemics of water-borne diseases.

“These water cuts came at the worst possible time, while Syrians are suffering in an intense summer heat wave,” Hanaa Singer, Syria representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said in a statement released Thursday.

“Some neighborhoods have been without running water for nearly three weeks leaving hundreds of thousands of children thirsty, dehydrated and vulnerable to disease.”

An estimated 3,000 children – 41 percent of those treated at UNICEF-supported clinics in Aleppo since the beginning of the month – reported mild cases of diarrhoea.

“We remain concerned that water supplies in Aleppo could be cut again any time adding to what is already a severe water crisis throughout the country,” Singer stated on Jul. 23.

The U.N. agency has blasted parties to the conflict for directly targeting piped water supplies, an act that is explicitly forbidden under international laws governing warfare.

As it is, heavy fighting in civilian areas and the resulting displacement of huge numbers of Syrians throughout the country has been extremely taxing on the country’s fragile water and sanitation network.

There have been 105,886 cases of acute diarrhoea in the first half of 2015, as well as a rapid rise in the number of reported cases of Hepatitis A.

In Deir-Ez-Zour, a large city in the eastern part of Syria, the disposal of raw sewage in the Euphrates River has caused a health crisis among the population dependent on it for cooking, washing and drinking, with UNICEF reporting over 1,000 typhoid cases in the area.

To date, UNICEF has delivered 18,000 diarrhoea kits to help sick children and is now working with its partners on the ground to provide enough water purification tablets for about a million people.

With fuel prices on the rise – touching 2.6 dollars per litre this month in the northwestern city of Idleb – families pushed into poverty by the conflict have been forced to cut back on their water consumption.

Water pumping stations have also drastically reduced the amount of water per person – limiting supplies to just 20 litres a day.

UNICEF’s efforts to deliver water treatment supplies took a major hit earlier this year when the border crossing with Jordan was closed in April, a route the agency had traditionally relied on to provide half a million litres of critical water treatment material monthly.

Despite this setback, the Children’s Fund has trebled the volume of emergency supplies from 800,000 to 2.5 million litres of water a day, amounting to 15 litres of water per person for some 200,000 people.

Organisations like OXFAM, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are all assisting the United Nations in its efforts to sustain the Syrian people.

In addition to trucking in millions upon millions of litres of water each month, UNICEF has also helped drill 50 groundwater wells capable of proving some 16 million litres daily.

Still, about half a million Aleppo residents are at their wits’ end trying to collect adequate water for families’ daily needs.

Throughout Syria, some 15 million people are dependent on a limited and vulnerable water supply network.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A soldier stands amidst the rubble of the December 2014 attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai and Kanya D'Almeida
PESHAWAR, Pakistan/UNITED NATIONS, Jul 15 2015 (IPS)

It has been seven months since a group of gunmen raided the Army Public School in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, killing 145 people, including 132 students.

“Since he died, there has been complete silence in our home. Nobody wants to speak. Asfand used to crack jokes and spread laughter – now he has left us, there is nothing to say.” -- Shahana Khan, the mother of one of the victims of the Peshawar school shootings in 2014
For the most part, the tragedy has faded off international headlines, but for the families of the victims and survivors, the memory is as fresh as the day it happened.

Speaking to IPS in her home in Peshawar, KP’s capital city and the site of last year’s attack, Shahana Khan cannot stop weeping.

Her 15-year-old son Asfand, a tenth grader at the public school, was one of too many children killed by members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Dec. 16, 2014.

“Since he died, there has been complete silence in our home,” she manages to say through her sadness. “Nobody wants to speak. Asfand used to crack jokes and spread laughter – now he has left us, there is nothing to say.”

The boy’s father, Ajun Khan, chimes in: “He kept our home happy. Without him, we will pass Eid al-Fitr [the religious holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan] in tears.”

His 11-year-old sister and seven-year-old brother share similar sentiments. Like other kids who lived through the tragedy, they have aged beyond their years.

They recount stories of their brother’s jokes and antics, as though momentarily forgetting that he is no longer with them. But then the tears start rolling again.

“I will recite the Holy Quran on his grave, and pray for his blessings,” the little bow vows solemnly.

Neither the kids nor their parents mention the school where the shootings took place, although it re-opened just a month after the incident.

For months, many families were too afraid to return to the scene. Though the students have gradually begun trickling back into their classrooms, fear is everywhere.

This lingering trauma is just one more obstacle standing between the Pakistan government and its ambitious education goals for this South Asian country of 182 million people.

Images of their dead or wounded classmates live on in the memories of students from the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, even seven months after the massacre. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Schools under attack

Throughout the decade of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the U.N.’s landmark poverty-reduction plan launched in 2000, Pakistan has lagged behind most member states.

In March the ministry of federal education and professional training published education statistics for 2013-2014, which revealed that the government was unlikely to meet the target of achieving universal primary education by the end of 2015, despite many pledges and promises on paper.

Pakistan’s education sector is comprised of over 260,000 schools, both public and private, where 1.5 million teachers attend to an estimated 42.9 million students.

But according to the Pakistan Education for All 2015 Review Report, published together with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), there are also 6.7 million out-of-school children in the country, one of the highest rates in the world.

And while 21.4 million primary-school-aged children are currently enrolled in public and private institutions, research suggests that only 66 percent will survive until the fifth grade, and a further 33.2 percent will drop out before completing the primary level.

Experts say that the dismal state of education in the restive northern provinces is largely to blame for these setbacks.

Women hold signs at a rally following the deadly attacks on a public school in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, which left 132 students dead. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Umar Farooq, an education official for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), told IPS that about 200,000 boys and girls in his region are out of school, largely due to the Taliban’s systematic attack on modern, secular education.

In the past 12 years, the Taliban have destroyed 850 schools, including 500 schools dedicated exclusively to girls, he said.

“FATA has the lowest primary school enrollment rate in the whole country – only 35 percent,” he added.

Prior to the December 2014 public school shooting, a report published by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack listed Pakistan as one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a student or teacher, on par with states like Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

Between the review period starting in 2009 and ending in 2012, armed groups in Pakistan attacked some 838 schools, mostly by blowing up buildings.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported that 30 students and 20 teachers were killed in those attacks, while 97 students and eight teachers were injured and 138 students and staff kidnapped.

Ishtiaqullah Khan, deputy director of the FATA directorate for education, told IPS that school enrollment and dropout rates have fluctuated according to ebbs and flows in the insurgency.

The period 2007-2013, for instance, when the Taliban was stepping up its activities in the region, saw the dropout rate touching 73 percent.

Citing government records, Khan said that some 550,000 kids in FATA have sat idle over the last decade. The numbers are no better in other provinces in the north.

Back in the summer of 2014, when a government military operation aimed at destroying armed groups drove nearly half a million people from their homes in the North Waziristan Agency, scores of children found their education interrupted as they languished in refugee camps in the city of Bannu, part of the KP province.

A rapid assessment report carried out by the United Nations in July 2014 revealed that 98.7 percent of displaced girls and 97.9 percent of the boys from North Waziristan were not receiving any kind of schooling in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned that an already weak primary school enrollment rate of just 37 percent in KP (31 percent for girls and 43 percent for boys) would worsen as a result of the massive displacement, since 80 percent of some 520,000 IDPs were occupying school buildings.

Director of education for KP, Ghulam Sarwar, told IPS the Taliban had destroyed 467 schools in the province in the last decade, and reduced the schooling system to dust in the Swat District where the 2012 shooting of Malala Yousafzai shocked the entire world.

Already traumatized from years of attacks on education, the lingering ghosts of the Dec. 16 tragedy have only added to the burden of students and parents alike.

Girls light candles in memory of those who lost their lives in late 2014, when armed gunmen invaded and opened fire on hundreds of students and teachers in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Overcoming trauma

Khadim Hussain, head of the Peshawar-based Bacha Khan Education Trust, told IPS that the Taliban “thrive on illiteracy”, preying on ignorant sectors of the population to “toe their line”.

For this very reason, he stressed, education in Pakistan is more important now than ever before, as the most sustainable weapon with which to fight militancy.

In October 2014, the Pakistan office for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced that school supplies worth 14.4 million dollars, donated by the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD), had been handed over to KP’s education department.

The funds were aimed at improving facilities in over 1,000 schools across KP and FATA, serving 128,000 students.

It was a promising moment – shadowed barely two months later by the daylong siege and massacre at the Army Public School in Peshawar.

With the bloodshed still fresh in everyone’s minds, Hussain’s suggestions are easier said than done.

Fourteen-year-old Jihad Ahmed, who survived the attack, is still afraid to go back to school. A sixth grader named Raees Shah, who saw his best friends die in front of him, has similarly had a hard time concentrating on his studies.

While some want desperately to forgot and move on, others – like ninth-grader Amir Mian – keep the memories of that day burning bright. When the attack began, Mian’s older brother had managed to escape the school premises unscathed, but came back to fetch the younger boy. When he did, he took a bullet and died shortly after.

“We will never forgive his killer,” the teenager told IPS. “We hope that God Almighty will punish his killers on the Day of Judgment.”

Funeral processions for the deceased students and teachers of a terrorist attack in northern Pakistan drew huge crowds of mourners last December. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

In a bid to restore the public’s confidence in the education system, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in February signed onto the 15-point plan for a Pakistan Safe Schools Initiative launched by A World At School, a global campaign working to get all school-aged kids into a classroom.

The 15 ‘best practices’ outlined in the agreement include community-based interventions such as involving religious leaders in the promotion of education as a deterrent to terrorist attacks, and improving infrastructure and safety mechanisms like constructing and reinforcing boundary walls.

Currently, only 61 percent of government schools and 27 percent of primary schools in rural areas have boundary walls, while scores of others lack protective razor wire atop their fortifications.

The programme’s donors and supporters hope it serves as a first step towards healing, and, ideally, to a more educated and resilient Pakistan.

Edited by Kitty Stapp