There are many successful programmes that governments and communities have created with UNICEF support to help realise children’s rights:

• In a number of Philippine villages, a holistic approach to early childhood care and development combines health, nutrition, psychosocial care and early education services for young children. The child-care centre provides children the time to play and books and other materials to explore. Health and nutrition workers teach parents how to better care for their children, administer routine immunisations and maintain a map of all the houses in the village, which documents each child’s growth rate, access to iodised salt and other micronutrients, and to clean water and sanitation facilities.
• In Bangladesh, a memorandum of understanding was signed in 1995 by the ILO, UNICEF and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, resulted in the placement of child workers in school programmes and significantly reduced child labour in the garment industry. The children’s jobs were offered to qualified adult family members.
• In Bolivia, UNICEF has supported the introduction of a National Insurance Programme for Maternity and Childhood to remove financial barriers to health services. This has increased the numbers of women and children under five receiving health care. In the span of two years, the number of prenatal visits increased by 63 per cent, deliveries in health facilities were up by a third, and the number of children treated for pneumonia increased by 40 per cent.
• In the West Lombok district of Indonesia, the local government requires that new buildings include latrines. Between 1994 and 1998, UNICEF supported the construction of 25,000 new latrines per year in the district, compared to 1,500 before the programme began.
• In Niger, UNICEF provided better agricultural tools and supplies to women who often work 14 hours or more a day to gather and prepare food for their families, resulting in increased output of cereals and the establishment of a co-operative cereal bank. This cereal bank, in turn, sold the grain to poor families at reasonable prices during the pre-harvest season. As a result, children’s malnutrition levels fell dramatically.
• In Yemen, UNICEF is helping bridge the gender gap in schools by assisting in training female teachers, supporting the construction of schools, strengthening the relationship between schools and community, and engaging media, religious and civic leaders to raise awareness of a girl’s right to education.

Other international organizations also have programmes to protect children from violence and armed conflict.

• A programme entitled Child Connect utilizes the latest telecommunications technology to reunite lost children caught in conflict or natural disaster situations with their parents. The project initiated by the International Rescue Committee uses a shared database available to all agencies in the field who can post data and photographs pertaining to lost children as well as search requests from parents. Searches that once took months can now be completed in hours.

• A new disaster response programme, which will provide and maintain mobile and satellite telephone service as well as microwave links for humanitarian relief workers. This will greatly improve and quicken humanitarian responses to the many unpredictable disasters we face today.

What areas need improvement?

Despite the many impressive achievements recorded over the past 10 years, there are still far too many children being denied their rights to survival, good health, education and development. And a significant number of countries are still failing to meet many obligations under the CRC. Gender, ethnic and linguistic discrimination continue to stunt children’s potential in countries around the world. Armed conflicts continue to deny children their rights and millions of children are being displaced and forced into refugee situations.

Poverty, characterised by poor sanitation, malnutrition, unsafe drinking water and inadequate health care, all of which clearly hamper the enjoyment of human rights by both children and adults.

The HIV/AIDS scourge has emerged as the biggest threat to societies’ realisation of their children’s rights. It is killing parents and turning millions of children into orphans – so far there are 13.2 million – who drop out of school and who are forced into extremely hazardous labour in factories or brothels to earn money. Already meagre resources of many governments are being used to fight the disease, denying other vital sectors of the economies important revenues.

Taken together, these issues represent some of the enormous challenges that the international community has to overcome in its efforts to ensure children their full rights.

Where do we go from here?

To help protect children’s rights the Secretary General has proposed the following goals in his Millennium Report:

• Poverty: Governments adopt a target of half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, and, in so doing, lifting more than 1 billion out of it.

• Education:By 2005, demonstrably narrowing the gender gap in primary and secondary education. By 2015, all children complete a full course of primary education.

• Employment: With the heads of the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation, a high-level policy network will be convened on youth and employment to create effective approaches to youth unemployment.

• HIV/AIDS: The reduction of HIV infection rates in persons 15 to 24 years of age by 25 per cent within the most affected countries by 2005 and by 25 per cent globally before 2010.
  
  
• Governments establish prevention targets of at least 90 per cent by 2005 and at least 95 per cent by 2010 of young men and women must have access to the information, education, and services they need to protect themselves from infection.
  
  
• Developing countries work with their pharmaceutical companies and other partners to develop an affordable, effective vaccine against HIV.

• Safe water: To reduce by half between now and 2015 the proportion of people who lack sustainable access to adequate sources of affordable and safe water.

How can rich countries help achieve these goals?

• Grant free access to their markets for goods produced in developing countries and to adopt, as a beginning step, at the Third UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries, a policy of duty-free and quota-free access for essentially all exports from the least developed countries.
• Reduce or, better, cancel the debt of the heavily indebted poor countries who are stuck in the poverty trap and divert much needed funds for health and education programmes to service their debt.
• Be more generous in granting development assistance, particularly to countries who are making great strides in poverty reduction.
• Work with pharmaceutical companies in developing an affordable and effective vaccine against HIV for wide distribution to developing countries.
• Develop strong partnerships with the private sector in combating poverty.
• Make special provisions for the needs of Africa in its struggle to overcome the continent’s problems.
• Free our fellow men and women from the scourge of war.
• Free our fellow men and women, and especially our children and grandchildren, from the danger of living on a planet ruined by human activities and whose resources can no longer provide for their needs.