More than half of South Africa’s children live in poverty
26, May, Daily Telegraph
More than half of South Africa's children live in poverty and one in
four has HIV, a damning report by the United Nations children's agency
has revealed.
Eighteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is now judged
to be one of the most unequal societies in the world and its 19 million
children bear the brunt of the disconnect. The Unicef report found that
1.4 million children live in homes that rely on often dirty streams for
drinking water, 1.5 million have no flushing lavatories and 1.7 million
live in shacks, with no proper bedding, cooking or washing facilities.
Four in 10 live in homes where no one is employed and, in cases of
dire poverty, the figure rises to seven in 10.Contrary to the rest of
Africa, where pneumonia and diarrhoea are the biggest child killers,
South African children are most likely to die from HIV/Aids.More than
five million are currently infected with HIV, and 40 per cent die from
the pandemic annually. Child support grants, introduced in 1997, now
reach 10.3m children but another one million who are eligible do not yet
receive them.
The figures were contained in a leaked report detailing Unicef's
joint plans with government to tackle the problems.Aida Girma, Unicef's
South African representative, said that two thirds of child deaths were
preventable with simple improvements in primary care for children.She
added that if "drastic" changes were not made immediately, South Africa
would fail to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goals of
eradicating child and maternal mortality and malnutrition."Because of
inequality in South Africa, national statistics tend to mask some of the
worst cases," she said.
"The government has a strong legal framework and a lot of pro-poor
policies and has made significant investment in these areas but some
children are still being left behind. We need to look at why all this
investment is not translating into results for these children."Rhoda
Kadalie, executive director of Impumelelo Social Innovations Centre
which seeks out novel ways to tackle poverty, said the problem could be
traced back to 1994, when the post-apartheid, ANC government focused on
"the economy, black economic empowerment and the consolidation of power"
rather than education and health care. |