From Africa Recovery, Vol.14#4 (January 2001), Briefs page

UNICEF: Three-year-olds can save the world

Declaring that "investment in the development and care of our youngest children is the most fundamental form of good leadership," Ms. Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), introduced the agency's annual flagship report, The State of the World's Children 2001 in New York on 12 December. She appealed to the world to stop its massive squandering of human potential, emphasizing that condoning childhood poverty not only is immoral, but also bad economic management, since it wastes human resources.

Ms. Bellamy argued that studies of human development demonstrate that the first three years of a child's life are vital to everything that comes later. This is the most vulnerable period in a person's life and demands the most care from society, says the report. Effective investment in health, nutrition, education, childcare and basic protection can unleash children's brain power and yield high returns to the children and to society. Every $1 spent on early childhood care yields a $7 return through cost savings, according to studies cited in the report.

Yet according to Ms. Bellamy, 170 million of the world's children are malnourished and more than 100 million never see the inside of a school. Fourteen of the 15 countries in which children have the highest chance of dying by the time they reach their fifth birthday are in Africa. More than 4 million under-fives died in sub-Saharan Africa in 1999, and those who survived have less chance than anywhere else to be enrolled in primary school.

The report indicates that leaders have failed to adopt development strategies that focus on early childhood, in part because poverty and onerous debt repayments hamper such efforts. The UNICEF report lays out a series of specific recommendations that include requiring legislation to make children the priority in all policy discussions and all budget meetings. It underscores the importance of the UN General Assembly's special session on children, to be held in September 2001.

That meeting will assemble leaders from governments and non-governmental organizations, as well as representatives of children and adolescents, to agree on a plan of action. Its aim will be to break the transmission across generations of poverty, violence, disease and discrimination that still afflict children and hold back the world's chances of achieving sustainable development.

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