 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
'The day will come'
By Rania KhallafIn the summertime, the Bride of the Mediterranean decks herself out in her most flamboyant garb to welcome the millions of holidaymakers who flock to her shores. Not far from the bronzed bodies gambolling on the sand, however, participants in an event of a more serious nature gathered recently for the second conference on childhood and motherhood, aimed at reviewing achievements and failures of the past decade in six governorates: Alexandria, Daqahliya, Menoufiya, Kafr Al-Sheikh, Gharbiya and Sharqiya.
The conference was held by the National Council on Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) under the auspices of Mrs Suzanne Mubarak. In a heartening departure from the norm, even the most formal sessions, which could have served as a simple excuse for self-congratulation, were fruitful; some governors had the courage to criticise their own plans and projects.
On 12 July, the NCCM also held a seminar to review the UNICEF's Progress of Nations Report 2000. Specialists, government officials, as well as representatives of the media and the NGO community working on children's rights, were all in attendance. On the same day, Carol Bellamy, UNICEF's executive director, was in South Africa to review the UNICEF report. "Bellamy's choice of location, [her decision] to launch this report in South Africa, is no coincidence. It is a call to the people of the world to save our children from polio, a disease threatening the future of all our children, not just the children of South Africa," noted Leila Bisharat, UNICEF's Middle East representative.
The Progress of Nations Report, published annually by UNICEF, measures individual countries' progress toward safeguarding children's rights. It monitors progress in comparison with the goals for 2000 set at the 1990 World Summit for Children and the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now ratified by 191 national parliaments. This year's report also addresses emerging issues facing the world's children in the 21st century.
"Our being here today has symbolic significance. It asserts Egypt's leadership in this field, and the fact that governmental bodies have put child-related projects on the top of the political agenda in the past decade," Bisharat said. The report, however, does not paint a rosy picture. It looks at the enormous efforts exerted worldwide to apply the projects elaborated since 1990, and may highlight some achievements for countries like Egypt, where child survival and development rates have advanced, but it also highlights real challenges, which concern rich and poor countries alike. "AIDS is certainly one of them. There is no vaccine against AIDS," she asserted.
photo: Gamal Said
Armed with findings that HIV/AIDS infects six people under the age of 25 every minute, the UNICEF Report reveals that, if nations hope to defeat the disease, they must commit to the "largest mobilisation of resources in their history" and organise themselves as if they were fighting "a full-blown war of liberation," with young people on the front line.
Bisharat pointed out that girls and young women are over 50 per cent more likely to contract HIV than boys and young men. "What this report tells us is that, so far, our efforts to stop the spread of HIV have not been sufficient. Particularly disturbing is the evidence that large numbers of young people in HIV-prevalent countries are not clear on how to protect themselves. Many do not know they are at risk at all -- especially girls -- and that's a disaster," she concluded.
HE Moushira Khattab, secretary-general of the NCCM, and President Mubarak's special representative to the World Summit for Children, which will be held in September 2001, gave a long speech highlighting the contents of the report, especially the emerging issues that will confront children and young people in the new century. "This report has special significance for us here in Egypt, because it coincides with the beginning of a new Decade of the Egyptian Child as well," said Khattab. Referring to the problem of AIDS, which is the focus of UNICEF's report this year, Khattab said "we are lucky because we do not have this epidemic disease, but this does not mean we should rest assured and ignore it."
According to UNICEF's statistics, 0.01 per cent of Egyptian women and the same proportion of men are HIV-positive.
Khattab echoed the opinions of some audience members at the UNICEF conference when she asserted that education is the only effective way of overcoming AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. "If we do not develop an awareness of protective measures, we are violating the rights of our children," she said. Still, Khattab was quick to assert that Egypt suffers from "far more serious and pernicious diseases than AIDS, including child labour, early marriage and FGM, which are practiced in the dark and in silence."
The report also highlighted the polio eradication programmes in the world, with a special emphasis on Egypt. Though polio has been eradicated throughout the Western hemisphere, the virus is still circulating in all other regions of the world, and about 120 countries are still carrying out mass immunisation campaigns against it. For decades, polio was one of the major childhood diseases in Egypt. With no reliable monitoring system -- which suggests that the actual number of victims was in fact even higher -- the number of confirmed cases hovered around 2,500 a year, crippling or killing countless numbers of children. In 1984, the Ministry of Health and Population, with the help of the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, launched an expanded immunisation programme. By 1999, Egypt was on the verge of eradicating polio. The report reveals that, before the establishment of the polio surveillance system in 1991, the annual number of polio cases was estimated at around 3,000. With the new system came the possibility of confirming reported cases and recording others that had previously gone undetected. The first year the system was put in place, the number of confirmed cases doubled as compared with earlier estimates, to 6,266, which seems to indicate that many polio sufferers had not been diagnosed prior to that date; thereafter, a marked drop was evident, to 120 cases in 1994, 100 in 1996 and only nine in 1999.
Both the UNICEF report and the NCCM's recommendations, however, agree that challenges remain before Egypt can hope to eradicate the crippling disease completely. The virus is still circulating in limited high-risk areas. Some governorates are unable to achieve the required standard of polio surveillance and implement an active search for cases. Moreover, traditions in some areas, especially in Upper Egypt, discourage women from going to health facilities to have their children vaccinated. Financial constraints also represent an obstacle in this respect. No government budget is allocated for national polio eradication measures, apart from inoculation.
Khattab also echoed the UNICEF report's focus on the need for greater social awareness of "lost children," whose number worldwide, as statistics show, ranges between 50 and 60 million under the age of 15. These children are often forced to perform some of the most abusive and exploitative forms of labour known to humanity. Child prostitution is widespread in many parts of the world; in others, children are often hired for a pittance as unskilled agricultural or industrial labourers, and exposed to dangerous pollutants and other grave health threats. "Child labour was also among the most serious problems that we discussed during the regional conference," Khattab said. "Child labour is prevalent in agricultural governorates where families force their children to work on the land during the harvest seasons, which sometimes coincide with the beginning of the school year." Mohamed El-Shennawi, governor of Daqahliya, said that six social centres have been established in different cities of the governorate to provide care for children who find themselves outside the framework of family care for one reason or another.
On an upbeat note, the Alexandria conference revealed that innovative solutions are being applied to old problems. For the first time, recommendations highlighted the importance of involving gender issues in development plans for childhood and motherhood, especially in villages, where girls' cultural and social development is often hindered by detrimental traditions. Gharbiya Governor Fathi Ibrahim noted, too, that businessmen have played an important role in establishing and funding programmes aimed at eradicating illiteracy. There is also a growing awareness of the need for child-care centres in villages, which could provide about 60 per cent of children aged four to six with an essential part of compulsory education, Ibrahim said. In Daqahliya, around 300 kindergartens have been recently built to serve 23,980 children. However, this figure represents only 9.4 per cent of the total number of children aged four to six.
A strenuous effort must be made, therefore, to address children's basic needs, but also those of women. According to recent statistics issued by the Ministry of Health, mothers' mortality is estimated at 100 per 100,000 women. However, the UNICEF report suggests that the rate is actually as high as 170 per 100,000. Ibrahim agreed that the problem is actually increasing in Gharbiya, mainly because of the lack of medicine and equipment in government hospitals.
Bisharat concluded: "What the world has been struggling with everywhere is that the improvement plans for children have not had the same importance as report on the stock market. We turn on the television every day, and we know what's going up or down in Cairo or Tokyo; but where are the children?"
She made an impassioned plea to the audience, echoing the report's optimistic prediction: "The day will come when nations will be judged not by their military or economic strength, but by the well-being of their people, by their levels of health, nutrition and education."
