In addition, the report
noted that significant progress has been made in saving children’s lives,
getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty, reports
NaijaAgroNet.
The global boys and girls now
attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, according to the
United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), just as the under-five mortality rates
have been more than halved since 1990, reports NaijaAgroNet.
Although the number of
people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half what it was in the
1990s, UNICEF said, progress has been neither even nor fair.
UNICEF in The
State of the World’s Children special reports also said, 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 3
times more likely to die before they are 5 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,” UNICEF
lamented.
Nowhere across the globe,
UNICEF report said, is the outlook grimmer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where at
least 247
million children – or 2 in 3 – live in multidimensional poverty, deprived of
what they need to survive and develop, and where nearly 60 per cent
of 20- to 24-year-olds from the poorest fifth of the population have had less
than four years of schooling.
Although education plays a unique role in levelling
the playing field for children, the number of children who do not attend school
has increased since 2011, and a significant proportion of those who do go to
school are not learning.
Further, the revealed that about 124 million children
today do not go to primary- and lower-secondary school, and almost 2 in 5 who
do finish primary school have not learned how to read, write or do simple
arithmetic.
The report equally pointed
to evidence that investing in the most vulnerable children can yield immediate
and long-term benefits. Cash transfers, for example, have been shown to help
children stay in school longer and advance to higher levels of education. On
average, each additional year of education a child receives increases his or
her adult earnings by about 10 per cent.
“And for each additional
year of schooling completed, on average, by young adults in a country, that
country’s poverty rates fall by 9 per cent,” official said.
UNICEF said that inequity
is neither inevitable, nor insurmountable, arguing that better data on the most
vulnerable children, integrated solutions to the challenges children face,
innovative ways to address old problems, more equitable investment and
increased involvement by communities – all these measures can help level the
playing field for children.
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