In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, the threat was huge, with 9 out of 10 children condemned to living in extreme poverty, unless things change.
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The year 2015 saw the one million children in this world whose birthday was also the their last day of life, says the UN State of World Children report released today. “Disadvantage and discrimination against their communities and families will help determine whether they live or die, whether they have a chance to learn, and later earn a decent living”, Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, writes in the report.
Based on current trends, 69 million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030, the target date for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Poor children are twice as likely as rich children to die before age 5, and poor girls are more than twice as likely to become child brides in signs of troubling inequality, said the annual report by the United Nations’ children’s agency. In fact, global mortality rates for children under the age of five have halved since 1990 and boys and girls now attend primary schools in equal numbers in 129 countries.
But this progress has been neither even nor fair, the report said.
But these advances have been “neither even nor fair”, the report finds, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the likelihood of death before age five of children born to uneducated mothers is nearly three times higher than those born to mothers with a secondary education.
9 out of 10 children living in extreme poverty. Over half of the 60 million primary school school-aged children who will not attend school will also be in the region.
Quality education has the power to end intergenerational cycles of inequity, improving the lives of children and the societies in which they live, but progress in expanding access and improving quality has stalled.
The world’s poorest children are twice as likely to die before they turn five and to be chronically malnourished than the richest, according to Unicef.
The report points out that the problems facing children in sub-Saharan Africa are particularly bad. For each extra year of schooling completed, on average, by young adults in a country, that country’s poverty rates fall by 9 percent.
By 2030, the report estimates that $340bn a year will be needed to fund education to the secondary level in low-income areas. It requires identifying the most vulnerable and working together to tackle the multiple deprivations across sectors.
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“Some countries in the fast lane for global economic growth – including India and Nigeria – have been in the slower lane for child mortality reduction”, said the State of the World’s Children 2016 report.
