Turning children into bombs

One in every five "suicide bombers" used by Boko Haram in the past two years has been a child, a report by UNICEF says.

"The use of children, especially girls, as so-called suicide bombers has become a defining and alarming feature of this conflict," Laurent Duvillier, regional spokesman for UNICEF said. "It's basically turning the children against their own communities by strapping bombs around their bodies."

Boko Haram child "suicide bombings" have surged ten-fold in West Africa in the last year, with children as young as eight, mostly girls, detonating bombs in schools and markets. Suicide bombings have spread beyond Nigeria's borders, with an increasing number of deadly attacks carried out by children with explosives hidden under their clothes or in baskets. Some young children probably did not know they were carrying explosives, which are often detonated remotely, Duvillier said. The tactic has proven effective in increasing the number of casualties as people do not usually see children as a threat.

There were 44 child "suicide bombings" in West Africa last year, up from four in 2014, UNICEF said, mostly in Cameroon and Nigeria. Three-quarters of the "suicide bombers" have been girls. Abducted boys are forced to attack their own families to demonstrate their loyalty to Boko Haram.

Almost one million Nigerian children are missing out on education as Boko Haram has destroyed more than 900 schools and killed more than 600 teachers, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

"Boko Haram is robbing an entire generation of children in northeast Nigeria of their education," Mausi Segun, Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Early marriage, early death

Uganda which has one of the world's highest rates of pre-teen and teenage pregnancies as the east African nation struggles to enforce laws to clamp down on child marriages. 300,000 girls every year get pregnant. One in every four girls aged between 15 and 19 fall pregnant, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and nearly half of girls are married before 18. Ugandan authorities have struggled to enforce laws that set a minimum marriage age of 18.

A study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2013 indicated that early marriages and resultant pregnancies are the biggest cause of deaths among 15 to 19-year-old girls in Uganda, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths. Others of those who survive the pregnancies can suffer lasting complications like fistula and disability.

Nakubulwa Mayi, a senior midwife at Mulago Referral Hospital the biggest hospital in the country, said pre-teen pregnancies posed serious physical and emotional risks to young girls. "At this age a girl should be playing with dolls but not to have to handle a baby," she said. 

Ignorance on risks of child marriage, limited access to education for girls, cultures dictating girls should marry young, and poverty, have all contributed to this growing trend of child marriage in Uganda.

Agnes Igoye, assistant coordinator of the anti-trafficking task force at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said early marriage is a form of sexual and gender-based violence with physical, social and economic effects. "Once married, few girls return to school even if it becomes economically viable," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Baby Trade

 Kenya — In this country of widespread poverty, one of the most lucrative businesses is also one of the most heartbreaking: baby trafficking. Kenya hosts one of the biggest child trafficking markets in West Africa, said Prudence Mutiso, an attorney with the Cradle Children Foundation. It is common in Kayole, a slum in the capital here, for gangs to steal or buy infants from mothers who are told their child had died or who can't afford to have more children. Fueling the trade are couples seeking to adopt children, kidnappers extracting ransoms from families desperate to reclaim their little ones and the economic value of children forced into labor. Children in Kenya can fetch between $2,000 and $3,000, depending on their gender, race and tribe — far more than the $1,246 annual income the average Kenyan earns.

"I witnessed a case where a woman wanted to sell her twins," said Julia Kattam, a health clinic administrator in Kayole. "She could not afford to feed them."

Lucy Wamboi, a Kayole resident who has helped friends try to find their missing children, said health workers sometimes participate in the trade. "The cost for a baby boy may be higher because they are in demand here," Wamboi said. "We've seen doctors selling babies to mothers." A trafficking scheme involves couples who place requests to adopt babies at Kayole clinics before they are born. Doctors who traffic in infants tell new mothers their babies didn't survive, and then fill the orders. In December, officials arrested Joseph Kangari, a local doctor who owns a clinic, and charged him and other staff with kidnapping and trafficking. Police said he was offering maternity services illegally and selling infants to infertile women.

he rush of poor Kenyans from the countryside into its sprawling cities is increasing the market, while traffickers commonly ferry young girls ages 10 to 14 from rural areas to Nairobi for prostitution and forced marriage, Mutiso said. "Poverty and lack of knowledge on trafficking are some of the factors contributing to trafficking," Mutiso added. The prosecution rate of offenders is low, she added. Prosecutors brought only 43 child-trafficking cases to court out of 200 cases reported to the foundation, according to a recent Cradle Children report. Only a handful resulted in convictions.

For the child

In Africa of today, myriads of intractable problems ravage the society.  They include internal crises, insecurity, child slavery, brain-drain, cultism, rape, hunger, kidnapping, lust, armed robbery, youth restiveness, prostitution, homosexuality, unemployment, corruption, poverty, disease, currency devaluation, inflation etc.  Of all these and other societal malaise, the commonest killers are hunger, poverty and disease.  The African child, to say the least, is the most vulnerable.

The African child becomes a house-boy, maid-servant, slave, armed robber, street beggar, hemp-smoker, prostitute, kidnapper or cultist.  As a matter of fact, hunger has disorganised many  Nigerian homes, families and children. The African child, because of poverty, is deprived of the good things of life namely quality education and medication, good health, security, shelter, among others. Crimes are the ugly dividends and by-products of this deprivation as the African child wants to survive.  The African child wants to be a parent, a home-owner. In fact, he or she wants to belong properly in the society.

Child mortality in Africa is high.  Death in Africa is mostly caused by diseases.  Typhoid, malaria, yellow fever among others are caused by bacteria and water borne diseases.  Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is the latest of all the death agents besides Ebola Virus Disease.  Poverty, unemployment and hunger have lured many African children into prostitution or child slavery.  Unemployment has prodded many girls into the sex industries.

It is a collective responsibility of all to see that hunger, poverty and disease are eradicated from the society particularly on the side of the African child.

Fact of the Day

 About 30 million primary school-aged children in sub-Saharan Africa are not in class, partially because of conflict and poverty. The situation is especially dire in West and Central Africa, which has the largest proportion of children out of school of any region in the world.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/education/article/UN-30-million-African-kids-missing-primary-school-5558573.php

Birthrights - Sub-Saharan Africa

The worst place in the world to give birth is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a woman has a one in 30 chance of dying as a result – while the best is Finland, where the risk of death is one in 12,200, according to a new analysis. The Save the Children mothers’ index, now in its 14th year, records not only the likelihood of death in pregnancy or labour but also the difficulties women face when they become mothers.

 The charity scores countries on maternal health, child mortality, education, women’s income and women’s political status. The top end of the table is dominated by European countries and Australia. The UK manages only 25th place, although it is ranked higher than the US at 30th. “The 10 top-ranked countries, in general, are among the best countries in the world for mothers’ and children’s health, educational, economic and political status,” says the report.

“The 10 bottom-ranked countries – all from sub-Saharan Africa – are a reverse image of the top 10, performing poorly on all indicators.
Conditions for mothers and their children in these countries are devastating.” In the bottom 10 countries, which include Nigeria, Gambia and Somalia, one woman in 30 is likely to die of a pregnancy-related cause. In these countries, one child in seven dies under the age of five, compared with one in 345 in Finland. Children get between two and nine years of education at best, whereas in Finland they can expect 17.

While the US scores well on the educational and economic status of women – 10th on both in the world – it is way behind the high-scoring countries on maternal health (46th) and children’s wellbeing (41st) and does badly on the political status of women (89th) – women hold only 18% of seats in Congress. Only five developed countries in the world – Albania, Latvia, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine – do worse than the US on maternal mortality.
Women in the US face a one in 2,400 risk of dying of causes related to pregnancy or childbirth. “A woman in the US is more than 10 times as likely as a woman in Estonia, Greece or Singapore to eventually die from a pregnancy-related cause,” says the report. Mortality among under-fives is 7.5 per 1,000 births in the US. “This is roughly on par with rates in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Qatar and Slovakia. At this rate, children in the US are three times as likely as children in Iceland to die before their 5th birthday,” says the report.

 Save the Children International’s chief executive, Jasmine Whitbread, said: “By investing in mothers and children, nations are investing in their future prosperity. If women are educated, are represented politically, and have access to good-quality maternal and child care, then they and their children are much more likely to survive and thrive – and so are the societies they live in. Huge progress has been made across the developing world, but much more can be done to save and improve millions of the poorest mothers’ and newborns’ lives.” For the first time, the charity has compiled a separate index on newborn deaths. While deaths of children under five around the world have come down substantially in recent years, there has been little progress on newborns.

The riskiest day of a child’s life is the day of its birth, says Save the Children: 1 million die on that day every year. The most dangerous place to be born, the index shows, is Somalia, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo; these are also the two most unfavourable countries for mothers.
Babies in sub-Saharan Africa are more than seven times as likely to die on the day they are born than babies in industrialised countries; Luxembourg, Iceland and then Cyprus have the best safety records.


from here