Sub-Saharan Africa's children worst off-UNICEF

Sub-Saharan Africa's children worst off-UNICEF 09 Dec 2004 10:59:53 GMT Source: Reuters

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - African children suffer most from poverty, disease and deprivation, the U.N. child rights organisation UNICEF said in its annual report on Thursday.

The State Of The World's Children report said Africa was the continent most in need of help to combat poverty, HIV/AIDS and war, the three main threats facing the world's children at the start of the 21st century.

The only three countries worldwide suffering a combination of all three threats were in Africa -- Liberia, Burundi and Rwanda. Across the continent, many others from Ivory Coast to Somalia were suffering from two of them.

UNICEF for the first time published tables listing all the world's countries and comparing their records on areas including HIV/AIDS, child mortality, health, education, economy and nutrition. (See www.unicef.org)

Carol Bellamy, the organisation's head who will step down next year after a decade, said the idea was to shame governments into action.

"The data is not a one-day story. It sure as heck ought to be used to try and accelerate better investments in children," she told Reuters.

A total of 1.9 million of the 2.1 million children under the age of 15 globally living with HIV/AIDS were in sub-Saharan Africa, where the adult prevalence rate for 15-49 year olds was the highest in the world by far at 7.5 percent against a world average of 1.1 percent.

The report said 12.3 million of the world's 15 million children already orphaned by HIV/AIDS were in sub-Saharan Africa, and it was estimated that by 2010 more than 18 million African children would have lost one or more parents to the pandemic unless swift action was taken.

Sub-Saharan Africa's life expectancy at birth in 2003 was 46 years against a world average of 63 and, while globally life expectancy had risen by seven years since 1970, it had actually fallen in 18 African countries over the same period.

Mortality rates for under fives in 2003 in sub-Saharan Africa were 175 per 1,000 against a world average of 80, while maternal mortality per 100,000 live births was 940 against a global average of 400.

Gross National Income per head was just $496 against a world average of $5,488, while the growth rate per head of Gross Domestic Product over the period 1990-2003 was just 0.4 percent a year against the world's 2.1 percent.

UNICEF also noted that between 1990 and 2002, 43 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa were forced to live on less than $1 a day -- more than double the world average.

The next highest percentage was Asia where 32 percent of the population were living on under $1 a day.

(Please see interview with head of UNICEF by double clicking on [nL08441089] and a factbox on UNICEF at [nL08713468])