Children account for a large percentage of the income-poor and the severely deprived worldwide. At least 600 million children under the age of 18 around the world are surviving on less than $1 a day; 40 per cent of these children live in developing countries. Every second child in developing countries is deprived of even the minimum opportunities in life.
Child-headed households: Children in child-headed households are more likely to be poor and to experience morbidity and mortality at higher rates than their peers.151, 152 For example, a study in Ethiopia has shown that children in child-headed households are very unlikely to receive treatment for illnesses, due to the limited capacity of children heading households to articulate their health problems and the fact that they there are oft en legally too young to claim the right to access public health services (it is customary in many countries to require that children present themselves with an accompanying adult in order to access public healthcare services). Even if young children do succeed in accessing health services, they are still subject to a higher risk of taking medications at wrong dosages or at the wrong time.
The same study showed that many children in child-headed households can only access low quantities of food, and that they oft en survive on rotten and thrown away foodstuffs. The study also found that, in most cases, these children engage in hazardous labour in exchange for food, or, in the case of girls, trade sex for food.
Children in child-headed households find it hard to go to school because of a lack of money and scholastic materials; even if they do attend school, the majority does not attend regularly, because they feel tired because of household chores, do have not enough food to sustain them during school hours, or are frequently sick. Most of those living in urban centres have to work late into the evening to make a living by selling cigarettes, roasted grain, lottery tickets, and so on. Most of these children score lower academically, especially in subjects that require extra timeand help – a trend that can be traced to a lack of adult pedagogic support at home.
Child-headed households are more likely to lose their right to a home through failure to secure inheritance rights, or because of property theft by opportunist relatives. Unlike adults, minors’ property rights are actually future rights, and therefore are more susceptible to being usurped by relatives or neighbours.
Moreover, unlike adults, children do not ordinarily have the mental maturity or the physical strength to resist such actions by relatives. Such children, especially those orphaned by AIDS, are more likely to be forced out of their homes and onto the streets by relatives or guardians, for ostensible fear of contagion or on the basis of unfounded allegations of witchcraft.
To complicate things further, customary practice and statutory law in most
African countries dictate that children must make their claims to property and inheritance through adult guardians. This requirement is further complicated by the reluctance of many guardians, who may themselves be suffering the adverse effects of HIV/AIDS, to represent the children, or by their tendency to compete with the children for the same property rights that the children seek to protect. Children who are bereaved of their parents after their parents have suff ered prolonged illness are likely to begin their new lives with very limited resources.
Illness is oft en impoverishing, oft en requiring households to sell off land to raise money for hospital bills and medication. Resources badly needed for survival are depleted even before the parents die, raising the risk of chronic poverty for the children when they subsequently become child-headed households. Girls in such households oft en end up as prostitutes or get married at a very early age, frequently to much older men, while the boys join armed groups, or make their way to the streets to look for petty employment.
With limited education, external support or means of generating income to provide for their families and a sense of desperation, children in child-headed households have no choice but to engage in what is known as child-controlled labour.
Conclusion: Despite Africa’s encouraging economic outlook in recent years, millions of children still struggle on the margins of survival on the continent. Child poverty is exacerbated by the rising impoverishment of households: as of 2005, 43 per cent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa lived on incomes of below US$ 1 a day.
Three quarters of the world’s ultra poor (122 million people) live in sub-Saharan Africa, and the number of poor people in the region living below the poverty line is also increasing in absolute terms, because of rising inequality.
The HIV pandemic, armed conflicts and population growth are all exacerbating Africa’s poverty. These factors are eating away at scarce resources both at the household and national levels, leading to a rise in the number of children suffering deprivation. On top of this, due to climate change, long spells of drought, increased demand for food, slow-growing supply, changing consumption patterns in major developing countries like China and the planting of crops for biofuel, the world is in the midst of an unprecedented severe food crisis, and Africa is hard hit.
The costs of poverty for children are enormous and brutal. Too many poor children die from avoidable diseases, and millions die or fall sick for lack of food and safe drinking water. About 30, 000 children every day succumb to preventable death for want of a glass of clean water and a meagre meal.
A huge and growing orphan population has been created by war and HIV. About 1,900 children are born with HIV every day on the continent; a million babies are stillborn every year and never see the light of day; still a child dies every minute for lack of a measles vaccine that costs as little as US$1 per child; and 6 million more die of hunger every year. Nearly fifty per cent of Africa’s children live in some form of housing deprivation. About 32 million sleep in tunnels, sniff glue and eat rotten food, largely forgotten and abused by the world around them. 240 million children defecate in open fields or come in contact with their faeces for lack of rudimentary sanitation facilities.
Poverty has continued to drive millions of children into slavery and onto the streets. About 50 million children work in slave-like conditions to survive each This is labour where the process as well as the returns from it are controlled entirely by the child himself/herself, unlike family-controlled labour, where both the process and the income are controlled by the family, or the trafficker in the case of trafficked children.