IRIN Web Special: Day of the African Child - Caring for a Young Future

DRC: Otunnu calls for protection of war-affected children

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, last week urged that the protection and rehabilitation of war-affected children become a "top priority" in the DRC. In a statement issued after his 10-day visit to the DRC, (28 May - 2 June), Otunnu also called on political and military leaders to bring a complete stop to all recruitment and use of child soldiers.

"There is an urgent need for a plan of action to address the grave situation of war-affected children in the Congo," he stated. "Their protection and rehabilitation must become a national and political priority." Otunnu observed that "the direct and indirect impact of the war has been particularly devastating for children."

It is estimated that 50 percent of the DRC's 49 million people are children under 16. Hundreds of thousands of children suffer or die from severe malnutrition and preventable diseases because of conditions created by the wars. "All these categories of war-affected children need our urgent attention and support," Otunnu said. "The place of children is in schools, is with their families and with their communities, not in the battlefields...The massive recruitment and use of children as child soldiers has become a plague that is steadily destroying the fabric and future of this country and this zone of Africa."

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ANGOLA: Children of war

Angola's long and brutal civil war has robbed millions of children of their youth and their futures. Statistics indicate that long after Angola extricates itself from its internecine conflict, its youth will continue to pay dearly.

Two years ago the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) described Angola as "the country whose children are at the greatest risk of death, malnutrition, abuse and development failure". Not much has changed since then. Angola has a young population - 45 percent of its estimated 12 million people are under 15 years old, more than 70 percent are under 30. They are paying the price of a war that has reduced the country's health, education, justice and social structures to ruins.

In its report to a conference earlier this year on the world's least developed countries, the Angolan government said its education system had always encountered difficulties, particularly since the resumption of civil war in 1992 - after the UNITA opposition rejected the ruling MPLA's victory at the polls. "This explains the deterioration or the advanced state of disrepair in which existing school infrastructures can be found, the quantitative and qualitative scarcity of teachers, high failure rates and the illiteracy rate of 42 percent," the report said. It added that 70 percent of children between six and 14 years old ran the risk of being illiterate.

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C?TE D'IVOIRE: School feeding programmes increase enrolment

In 1989, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Ivorian government began a lunch programme for primary schools aimed at boosting enrolment rates. In its first year, 37,000 pupils in 277 schools benefited from the initiative. By the end of last year, 1.2 million students had gained from the US $35-million spent on food.

Nationwide school canteens have drawn more students to schools, especially girls, who in the last two years have accounted for 40 percent of the students. Southern towns have been the most successful with enrolment rates of up to 83 percent.

Kotolo village, about 400 km north of Abidjan, is a good example of the project's success. Kotolo's canteen feeds about 120 students every day. Each student can buy a variety of nutritious rice-based meals for 25 francs CFA (US $0.03). Kotolo's enrolment rates have increased. Girls account for half the student body, a feat which school teacher Emile Ouattara describes as commendable given that traditionally girls are kept at home while boys work the farms.

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KENYA: Kakuma mission highlights issue of girls' education

The initial observations of a UN inter-agency mission exploring the education sector in Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps, in northwestern and northeastern Kenya respectively, included particular concern about girls' access to education at the late primary and at secondary school levels, as well as about teacher training and teaching-learning resources. The mission follows a request by UNHCR, which is keen to explore how it could sustain or improve the level of education provision for the refugees in Kakuma, Turkana District, and Dadaab, Garissa District, in the face of a funding crisis for the refugee agency.

In addition to addressing the issue of education for the girl child, the UN inter-agency mission is to consider opportunities for improving teacher training, enhancing community involvement and improving coordination between the different NGOs involved in education provision in Kakuma and Dadaab. It will assess the strategy for the education of refugees in the two camps in the context of that being offered to the predominantly Turkana and Somali host populations in Turkana and Dadaab districts, UN sources told IRIN.

On a preliminary visit to Kakuma, the mission team found that more than 30,000 of the refugee population were in schools: some 4,800 in pre-school; over 19,000 in primary schools; 5,800 in secondary school; and some 420 girls in a drop-out programme for women and girls. About 3,000 others were receiving asistance in adult, vocational and special education.

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Baby orphan Mahad struggles to drink the drops of milk from a pipette, patiently squeezed into his tiny mouth by the nurse. Cradled in her arms, his huge eyes are drowsy with the effort of living. If he survives - and the nurse feels he will - Mahad will face a lifetime of battles. Being without parents and family means he is sentenced to find his way through life without the most crucial source of identity in Somali society and culture: that of clan.

"Clan is everything here. You need clan to marry, to get credit, to get a bank account, to get property, to belong. Without clan, you are a nobody in society," said one of the social workers at the children's home, which is now Mahad's world.

In Somali culture, clan is the inherited patriarchal lineage of ancestors, passed down orally in detail, generation to generation, determining origin, social standing, and access to territory, property and power. In times of trouble, the clan also pays a penalty for inflicting death or injury, which relieves the burden from individuals and families. At its worst, clan leads to conflict, xenophobia and control. "But at its best, the clan works like the western world's social security welfare system. It protects, it means that all actions against you and your family will have consequences," said a Somali source. "Orphans do not have that."

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SUDAN: American resettlement of "lost boys" continues

The US State Department expects to complete by September of this year a programme of resettling approximately 3,800 Sudanese children and young adults from Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, which it began in November 2000. These refugees, predominantly boys and young men, known as the "lost boys" of Sudan, are among an estimated 17,000 who were separated from their parents and fled on foot to Ethiopia - walking more than 1,000 km on the four-month journey, a State Department press release noted on Monday.

Management of the refugee camps to which the boys went was delegated by the Ethiopian government to the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which subjected the youths to military training and viewed them as a recruitment pool for the rebel army, according to the NGO Refugees International. Some joined the army voluntarily with the promise of education; others were taken forcibly by the SPLA, who had organised their original flight from Sudan, it said.

In 1991, the Ethiopian government closed the refugee camps, and the boys were sent back to Sudan. Many were enslaved by armed tribesmen; others succumbed to starvation or bombings by government planes, but, remarkably, thousands survived, according to Refugees International. By May 1992, 10,500 of the "lost boys" had reached Kakuma camp in Turkana District, where they were classified as unaccompanied minors (UACs) and placed in special sections of the camp.

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TANZANIA: Focus on child rights

The government of Tanzania has expressed concern at what it calls "a worrying contradiction" between the intensive focus on macroeconomic issues and unsatisfactory progress in critical areas of human and social development, especially for children.

At a recent meeting of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva, Switzerland, the Tanzanian delegation presenting its country report, complained that external debt, poverty, HIV/AIDS and other adverse conditions had hampered the government's full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The UN committee experts on 8 June expressed concern that, despite steps taken by Tanzania to protect child rights, the payment of some 40 percent of its national income to services related to external debt was likely to hinder programmes of equity and access in education as well as complementary basic education for the girl child.

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