Poverty and early deaths await millions of world's most disadvantaged children – UNICEF
UNITED NATIONS. KAZINFORM Some 69 million children under five years of age 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, unless the world focuses more on the plight of its most disadvantaged children, according to a United Nations report published today.
“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures – by fueling intergenerational cycles of disadvantage, it imperils the future of their societies,” said the Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Anthony Lake, on the release of The State of the World's Children, the agency's annual flagship report.
“We have a choice: Invest in these children now or allow our world to become still more unequal and divided,” he added.
The report notes that significant progress has been made in saving children's lives, getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty. Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, and the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half what it was in the 1990s.
But this progress has been neither even nor fair, the report flags. The poorest children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday and to be chronically malnourished than the richest.
Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost three times more likely to die before they are five than those born to mothers with a secondary education. And girls from the poorest households are twice as likely to marry as children than girls from the wealthiest households.
Read more at the The UN News Centre