World sees progress on survival, development rights of children
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The world has seen marked progress in child survival, disease control and education, according to a report issued in Beijing on Friday by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and Xinhua News Agency.
The launch of the report, a special edition of the UNICEF's series on "The State of the World's Children", marked the Universal Children's Day and the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on Nov. 20, 1989.
It was also part of Friday's Global News Day for Children aiming at raising public awareness on children's living environments and their development.
Since the adoption of the CRC, the first legally binding international agreement on protection of children's rights, there has been substantial progress in key survival and development outcomes and in providing of essential services, enhanced utilization of healthy behaviors and practices, and diminished gender discrimination in access to education, showed the report.
It also gave a dozen of specific figures as below:
-- The annual number of global under-five deaths has dropped from 12.5 million in 1990 to less than 9 million in 2008.
-- Exclusive breastfeeding for infants less than six months old has increased in all but one developing region.
-- Vaccines save millions of child lives and have helped reduce global measles deaths by 74 percent since 2000.
-- HIV prevalence has declined among women aged 15-24 attending antenatal clinics since 2000, in 14 of 17 countries with sufficient data to determine trends.
-- The number of children out of school declined from 115 million in 2002 to 101 million in 2007, and around 84 percent of children of the appropriate age are now in primary school.
-- Survival to the last primary grade for children in developing countries was more than 90 percent in 2000 to 2007 according to international survey data.
-- Gender parity in primary education is improving with the gender parity index at 96 percent or higher in most developing regions.
However, according to the report, stronger advances are required in many areas of child development.
In child survival, which shows perhaps the most measurable advance, an average of 25,000 children under five are still dying each day, mostly from causes preventable with low-cost, proven interventions.
The report stated that pneumonia and diarrhea are the biggest killers of children under five, accounting for 40 percent of deaths for this age cohort. Yet access to antibiotics and oral rehydration therapy - simple, proven interventions to combat these diseases and conditions - remains low in many developing countries.
Challenges abound in education too, said the report. It is estimated that due to poverty and the resulting lack of stimulation, an estimated 200 million children under five are at risk of not developing to their full potential.
The report stressed that greater efforts were needed to confront widening disparities. One billion children are deprived of one or more services essential to survival and development.
The report called for better delivery of essential services to children, such as to improve maternal, newborn and child primary health care; make education systems child-friendly; take efforts to protect children from violence, abuse, exploitation, neglect and discriminations.
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