Posted: Sep. 6, 2016 7:00 am Updated: Sep.
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Children make up about a third of the world’s population, but account for nearly half of all refugees UNICEF said in its report issued on Tuesday.
“What’s important is that these children on the move are children”.
Out of this total of almost 50 million children, 28 million were forcibly displaced by violence and insecurity.
Of the 28 million children, 10 million are child refugees and one million are asylum-seekers whose status has not yet been determined.
Nearly 50 million children throughout the world are “uprooted”, forcibly displaced from their home countries by war, violence or persecution, the United Nations children’s program said on Wednesday.
Increasingly, these children are traveling alone, with 100,000 unaccompanied minors applying for asylum in 78 countries in 2015, three times the number in 2014, the report found.
In 2015, of all children under the protection of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 45 per cent were from Syria and Afghanistan. Because these children often lack documents, they are especially vulnerable.
“Indelible images of individual children – Aylan Kurdi’s small body washed up on a beach after drowning at sea or Omran Daqneesh’s stunned and bloody face as he sat in an ambulance after his home was destroyed — have shocked the world”, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement.
The report estimates another 20 million children are migrants, driven from their homes by poverty and gang violence among other things.
As well as the risks they face at home and while leaving, children face further discrimination and xenophobia when they reach their destination country, the report warned.
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The report urges action that not only improves conditions for refugee and migrant children-like keeping them together with their families and speeding up legal processes associated with their migration-but also measures to address the root causes of large-scale migration.
