Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - December 12, 2004
Andrew Donaldson
And, according to a shocking United Nations report released this week, more than half the world's children, more than a billion in total, suffer extreme deprivation because of war, HIV/Aids or poverty.
Worse still, Unicef's Childhood Under Threat: The State of the World's Children 2005 reports that, since 1990, almost half of the 3.6-million people who have been killed on the front lines of the world's conflicts were children.
Speaking in London, Unicef's executive director Carol Bellamy blamed the world's governments for what was termed "this robbery of childhood".
"These statistics only scratch the surface of what this report is about," she said. "Fundamentally, it is about a failure of leadership."
The report reveals sub-Saharan Africa is the worst place in the world to be a child.
In this region, the infant mortality rate and the under-five mortality rates are almost double the rest of the world's; the maternal mortality ratio is more than double; and just 57% of the population has access to "improved drinking water sources" compared with the global 83%.
About 80% of the 15 million children worldwide who have lost a parent to Aids live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa's wars and conflicts have thrown up appalling statistics. More than 300000 children were butchered in just 90 days in 1994 in Rwanda - roughly the same number as children born in Canada last year.
Child poverty had worsened in a number of developed countries, including Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria and Italy, the report said.
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