Poverty blights the lives of children
By 2030, nearly 70 million children under the age of five will have died from preventable causes unless serious steps are taken to narrow the gap between rich and poor, UNICEF’s annual State of the World’s Children report predicts. Up to 167 million children will be living in poverty. More than half the people in low and middle income countries already live on less than US$5 a day.
Nowhere is the situation grimmer than in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2030, nine children out of every 10 children living in poverty will be found here.
Poverty is more than a lack of money, especially when compounded by conflict. Children lack food, health care, sanitation and clean drinking water. There will be 60 million primary school-aged children not studying by 2030.
The problem is not limited to Africa and the Middle East. Across the EU, one child in five lives in poverty. In 2014, the Australian Council of Social Service found that 17.7 percent of all children in Australia were living in poverty.
World governments signed an ambitious blueprint last year to end global inequality. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that the international community would “leave no-one behind”. He added, “The new agenda is a promise by leaders to all people everywhere. It is a universal, integrated and transformative vision for a better world … for people, to end poverty in all its forms”.
In the same year, key targets of the millennium development goals expired unmet.
The lead author of the report, Kevin Watkins, told the Guardian that the findings are “another example of where the gap between the rhetoric of leaving no one behind, and the reality of what … governments do is very, very stark.
“The truth is that governments have signed up to these commitments on leaving no one behind with absolutely no intention, for the most part, of doing anything”, he said.
