Maina Waruru, AfricaNews reporter in Nairobi, Kenya Photo: Mike Legurra
The United Nations children agency - UNICEF- has called on African governments to increase their investment in children saying that some 4.5 million children under the age of five continue to die of preventable causes each year in the continent.
The UN body in a statement released Wednesday to coincide with the annual celebrations of the Day of the African Child said that governments must do more to promote basic health, nutrition, education and general well-being of children by increasing their budget allocations to social services.
Poor health, malnutrition and widespread poverty continued to afflict millions of children in Africa while millions of children continued missing on education, said Antony Lake UNICEF executive director.
Evidence, he said, had over time showed that where children and mothers had poor health, nutrition and less education they earned less and became less productive members of society and passed their poverty to next generations.
“Investing in children today will yield benefits for generations to come,” said the UNICEF chief in a statement on the agency’s website.
Some African governments, according to UNICEF, had made strides in improving allocations to education and health greatly reducing child mortality rates and cited Malawi as one of the poor countries that had made marked improvement in child health and education services.
Lake said many governments had via various declarations pledged to commit up to 15% of their budgets to health, 20% education and 10% to agriculture but did not elaborate whether any of the governments had implemented this.
Strides however had also been made in school enrollment since the 1990s, UNICEF added. It said school attendance was on the rise across the continent with gender disparity between boys and girls slowly closing. Benin, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania were singled out as some of the countries that had rapid progress in providing education for children.
Some 45.5 million children of school-going age however remained out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa underling the fact that much needed to be done to achieve universal education for all.
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