The New Nation - Internet Edition

Fifteen years have elapsed since the world embraced the terms of childhood as laid down in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the intervening years, children's rights have been vigorously championed by many, UNICEF among them. Never before have children's rights been so high on the public agenda; never before have children's voices been heard as clearly and distinctly by the international community as they were during the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children in 2002.

Yet for hundreds of millions of children, the-promise of childhood that undergirds the Convention already appears broken as poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS threaten their lives and well-being. Though a childhood of love, care and protection, in a family environment, with ample scope to survive, grow, develop and participate is the right of every child, millions do not experience it. When they become parents, their own children also risk having their rights denied as the threats to childhood, particularly the ones highlighted in this report, replicate themselves from generation to generation. This is already evident in the lives of millions of youth - those aged 15 to 24 - who have grown up since the Convention was adopted and who are still living amid penury, conflict, violence, exploitation and disease. To take but one example, more than 140 million youth were illiterate in 2000, over 60 per cent of them young women.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we, the adults of the world, have failed these young people and are failing the children of today. But this does not have to be the case. We have an unparalleled opportunity to fulfil the rights of children. The intent is there, as evidenced by the near-universal ratification of the Convention and the endorsement of other international and national instruments related to children's rights and well-being. The resources knowledge, money, technology, people are available in abundance: by any aggregate measure, the world is richer than it has ever been. The targets are clear: Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and fulfilment of the broad aims embodied in 'A World Fit for Children', though not a panacea for all childhood's woes, would do much to make the world a better place for children. Decades of human development research have fine-tuned our strategies: We now know, for example, that for development gains to be sustainable, the participation of all parties - including children and young people - is essential.

Previous chapters have outlined ways in which the threats to childhood posed by poverty, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS can be lessened, or even eliminated. There is hope as well as discouragement in the fact that all three of these areas are so interconnected. While poverty fuels conflict, which in turn creates more poverty in a destructive spiral - and both render people much more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS the flipside of this coin is that a serious assault on poverty will also reduce both conflict and HIV/AIDS.

And there is the optimism that infuses both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. If every family, community and government lived by the principles and worked to realise the standards established by the Convention, which preceded all other current commitments to children by over a decade, the Millennium Development Goals would be met and 'A World Fit for Children' would become a reality.

Will we create a world fit for children in which every child enjoys a childhood? Will the promise of the Convention ever be ful. filled? Sceptical voices murmur "No," pointing to the broken promises of the past to support their view that too little will be done. Their point of view is understandable: Time and time again the world has clearly failed to live up to its commitments to children. But UNICEF does not share their opinion. From its inception, the organisation has held the conviction that the rights of all children everywhere can be fulfilled, if only the world demonstrates the will required to enact its promises.

The notion of will is pivotal to creating a world fit for children. It is will that translates intentions into action. The will of one woman, Eglantyne Jebb, inspired her to launch the Save the Children Fund in 1919, in response to the misery of thousands of children in Europe. The will of the international community led to the creation of UNICEF in 1946 to look after the needs of children in post-war Europe. That will has helped save millions of lives as UNICEF has expanded its work into every developing nation where children's lives are at risk.

Not all of us will have the opportunity to launch a children's fund or to save the lives of millions of children. But we all have a part to play in ensuring that every child enjoys a childhood. Children's rights are human rights, the rights that we all share. The fulfilment of rights implies responsibilities. It is the duty of each and everyone of us - not just parents, guardians and relatives, educators and governments - to guarantee that the terms of childhood laid out in the Convention, which our governments have endorsed on our behalf, are upheld for every child. States and societies, communities and families, individuals and international agencies and, most importantly, children and young people themselves - are all duty-bound to fulfil children's rights.

Children's rights, human development and moral considerations are increasingly intertwined. In a world that brings us televised or Internet images of suffering from the other side of the planet, we are as capable of being moved by the pain of someone 5,000 kilometres away as we are by that of someone next door. In this sense, we are increasingly becoming a global community in which we can no longer partition off our ethical responsibility along local or even national lines

No image is more likely to speak to us across continents, from beyond oceans, than that of a child in distress. A girl abducted from her village and forced into sexual slavery by a gang of armed rebels: the very idea is unbearable. It moves us to justified anger, to a desire to do whatever we can to ensure that it does not happen again. The difficulty is to have the same response to - and the same sense of responsibility towards - all the hundreds of thousands of children who we do not see or read about, except as bald statistics: those, for example, who die for want of a simple hydrating formula that could counteract the ravages of diarrhoea; those who die from diseases that are preventable either by inexpensive vaccinations or increased access to basic health-care services; those who are orphaned by HIV/AIDS, without family or the comfort of even one caring adult.

Although some of these threats to children have existed since the dawn of recorded history, in a very real sense we live in a new world. Since 1990, we have committed ourselves, through the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its two Optional Protocols, the Millennium Declaration and its associated goals, 'A World Fit for Children' and other international, regional and national initiatives, to a conception of childhood that is profound in its implications and will stand for decades, even for centuries to come. It gives us a clearer vision than ever before of what a safe, healthy, active childhood should look like.

For governments, the message is unambiguous: Keep your commitments to your nation's children. Despite numerous treaties and pledges, despite the UN Special Session on Children, there is simply not enough being done to realise children's rights: They must be given the highest priority. A key starting point for many nations will be to make progress in the health and development of their children a priority. At present, it is estimated that approximately one third of the global burden of disease is borne by children.

Without greater attention to providing basic health care and education services for children, it is clear that most of the Millennium Development Goals will not be met in full by 2015.

Of all the MDGs, it is widely acknowledged that progress has been slowest on reducing under-five mortality. This goal can be achieved: It is estimated that two thirds of the almost 11 million under-five deaths that occur each year could be averted if children would receive appropriate home care and if simple curative treatments for the common childhood illnesses were available. The interventions to prevent child deaths, such as immunization, exclusive breastfeeding and oral rehydration therapy, are well known and tested, and an be scaled up even in resourcepoor settings. Achieving the MDG for child survival is therefore a clear case of will, for while the financial investment will be fairly modest, massive efforts will be required in social mobilisation and the development of innovative strategies for delivering the interventions.

Reaching every child with a basic package of essential, proven interventions will demand cooperation between governments, bilateral and multilateral agencies, non-governmental organisations, health professionals, professional associations and the private sector. Such a collaboration, including governments, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, and many others, has recently been formed under the auspices of the Child Survival Partnership to respond to the health crisis facing children and help countries scale up their interventions rapidly. The partnership provides a forum for coordinated action to enable governments and partners to agree on consistent approaches to child survival interventions and to ensure concerted efforts towards their implementation.

The Child Survival Partnership is not a fund-holding or fund-disbursing organisation. It is an advocacy initiative for the increased mobilisation of resources and support for child survival programmes by participating countries and organisations to meet a specific objective: attain the fourth Millennium Development Goal. The interventions it recommends and encourages will require substantial additional funding, however, from national, bilateral and multilateral sources, as will other initiatives designed to achieve the MDGs, and other rights-based and development targets.

Doners, therefore, are also pivotal actors in ensuring that every child has a childhood. Promises made to children at the Special Session and enshrined in 'A World Fit for Children' cannot be forgotten. Pledges made following the Monterrey Consensus in 2002 to increase official development assistance by around $18.5 billion a year until 2006 must also be realised. Though this may appear a substantial sum, in truth it is a minimal increment: A figure closer to $50 billion annually over the same period would be required to meet all of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.2 The quality of aid also requires enhancement through improved harmonisation of donor policies with recipients' priorities. Investment in essential goods, services and infrastructure that directly satisfy children's rights is crucial: without it, none of the other international development agendas will be realised. Each nation must apply a human rights-based approach to social and economic development By 1994, four years after the Convention's inception, nearly 170 nations had accepted the document as an internationally agreed standard for childhood. A decade has since passed and human rights have been elevated to the top of the international agenda. But few governments have been guided by human rights principles in all of their actions towards their citizens.

The human rights-based approach to development is relatively new (see Panel: The human rights-based approach to development: Examples from Latin America, page 92). It is based on a longterm process of investing in people as citizens and actors in their nation's destiny as well as supporting their capacity to hold their government accountable for its promises. Placing rights at the heart of human development strategies allows countries to give attention to those children and vulnerable members of society living at its margins; to prioritise goods and services essential for children's survival, health and education; and to construct a protective environment to safeguard children from the rights violations that cannot easily be quantified: abuse, exploitation, violence, conflict, bonded labour, stigmatisation and discrimination.

Applying new concepts such as the human rights-based approach to development and the protective environment is not only important for governments: donors and international agencies also have much to gain. Refinements in development thinking over the decades have broadened UNICEF's approaches to its own programmes. We now know, for example, that educating children caught up in armed conflict, which was previously not given a high priority among our core commitments to children in emergency situations, is actually vital for injecting stability into their lives (see 'Education', Chapter 3, 'Children Caught up in Armed Conflict', page 58).

The threats to, and opportunities for, childhood are not static: they evolve with the changing of the world. Each new generation faces fresh challenges: for instance, polio, long a leading cause of child deaths, has almost been eradicated, but a new threat - HIV/AIDS - has emerged. On the brighter side, the leap in information technology achieved in the 1990s has allowed several developing countries, India among them, to make great strides towards closing the technology gap with the industrialized nations. The utilisation of information technology is almost certainly destined to drive economic development in most countries. But it is not without cost or concerns, including the danger posed to children by predators using the Internet, and the difficulty faced by parents in monitoring their children's use of the web.

There is no excuse for ignorance. It is the responsibility of both governments and donors to be aware of how children are affected by poverty, discrimination, ignorance, labour and exploitation, life-threatening diseases and the environment. Accountability and knowledge provide a firm basis for action and must be incorporated into policies and programmes to bring about change.

Governments must adopt socially responsible policies, keeping children specifically in mind. For any government hoping to promote and protect human rights and achieve sustainable development, especially in the areas of poverty reduction and lowering HIV/AIDS prevalence, pursuing measures with children specifically in mind is the most effective route. Applying human rights principles to child policies will bring rich rewards. Educating and supporting citizens to participate in civic affairs will enhance their capacity to support their children's development and ensure the protection of their rights. Abolishing school fees will encourage poor families to enrol their children in school, as it has done in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania, allowing millions of children to enjoy their right to an education.

Mechanisms that increase the transparency and accountability of state services will help ensure that these are of the highest quality possible and the least wasteful of human and financial resources. Empowering and directing resources to marginalized groups will assist in strengthening the social fabric and reducing potential social discord, conflict and disintegration. Provision of social and protection services should be mandatory, not optional, and citizens should be encouraged to participate and fulfil their own duties to children and to society.

The resources are available to fund a global transformation of childhood, through both increased official development assistance and improvements in the quality of national public finances. Implementing national plans of action for children with a set of specific, time-bound and measurable targets and goals, as agreed to at the UN Special Session on Children, would go a long way towards meeting the agenda of 'A World Fit for Children', The monitoring and analysis of national budgets from the perspective of their impact on children is a promising approach to promoting increased resource allocation for children and maximising their effective use. Better targeting of education, health and social assistance services towards the poor, addressing government-related impediments to service quality and effectiveness, increasing community participation and scaling up on the basis of successful programmes would help meet the requirements of the Monterrey Consensus for developing countries - and must be matched by increased donor funding. Substantial additional resources could be freed up, for example, by diverting expenditure on weapons and other military equipment. If even a fraction of this expenditure were diverted to health or education, it would release millions if not billions - of dollars.

Individuals, families, businesses and communities: all are duty-bound to make the Convention a reality by using their resources and capabilities to promote and protect children's rights. An array of possibilities exists for participation in activities that will benefit children, from sitting on school councils or volunteering as a youth counsellor, to sponsoring a local football team or expressing outrage at violations of children's rights to politicians and other leaders. All that is required is commitment and willingness to get involved and to stay engaged.

Childhood is the foundation of the world's future. And though the future may look bleak now, we must not despair. Our optimism is rooted in history - the world has shown that it is capable of doing great things when it has the will to achieve them. Major feats have already been achieved. To take just one example, children are half as likely to die before the age of five today as they were 40 years ago, largely thanks to better access to healthcare services and increased knowledge of the causes of child deaths. Expert opinion is that the Millennium Development Goals can still be achieved if both donor and recipient countries increase their efforts. Several countries are already putting in place the elements required to create a protective environment for children that will help meet the protection aims of 'A World Fit for Children'. Although idealistic in the context of past experience, these goals are realistic in the sense that the principal obstacle standing in their way is the lack of will and commitment to achieve them.

Many are already contributing, at all levels and in innovative ways, to ensuring that every child enjoys their right to a childhood. Many more must follow their example.