WUNRN
AFRICA POPULATION EXPLODING - WOMEN
& GIRLS FACE POVERTY, HIGH FERTILITY, CHILD MARRIAGE, VIOLENCE, HEALTH
& EDUCATION NEEDS +
http://www.unicef.org/policyanalysis/index_74707.html
Generation
2030/AFRICA
Generation 2030/AFRICA
Direct
Links to Full 64-Page 2914 Report:
High-fertility
rates and rising numbers of women of reproductive age mean that given current
trends, over the next 35 years nearly 2 billion babies will be born in
DATA - http://data.unicef.org/gen2030/
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http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=5d5693a8f1af2d4b6cb3160e8&id=0fecd22e0e&e=1e22dbc3a0
As
Africa’s Population Growth Explodes, Its Children May Lose Out
By Barbara Crossette - September 09, 2014
Among new studies surveying
the fate of children globally in 2014, a year that may be remembered as the
most violent and catastrophic in more than half a century, Unicef has looked
into the future of Africa and found that an unexpectedly persistent population
boom is not only robbing children of opportunity, but also hobbling the
continent’s economic growth and changing the world’s demographic profile.
“The future of humanity is
increasingly African,” the report, published in August, concludes.
Saying that its previous
population projections have proved to be underestimates, Unicef reports that by
2050, Africa will account for around 41 percent of all the world’s births, 40
percent of all children under 5 years old and 37 percent of all children under
18. The survey, a revision of Unicef’s "Generation 20/30 Africa:
Child Demographics in Africa, says that “on current trends, almost 2 billion babies
will be born in Africa in the next 35 years.”
From 2015 to 2050, Africa’s
population will double to 2.4 billion people from 1.2 billion. The global
population is now about 7.2 billion, projected to rise to about 11 billion by
the end of this century. By then, Africa is projected to have almost quadrupled
its current population of more than 4 billion and will be home to almost 40
percent of the world’s people. The quality-of-life situation does not look promising.
Millions of African
children suffer in persistent or recurring regional conflicts and already lack
acceptable health care, nutritional food and adequate education in numerous
countries. Where public services exist, they will be further strained under
pressure of rapidly increasing numbers. Governments lack the imagination,
ability or commitment — sometimes all three — to put in place policies to meet
such challenges.
Money is not always the
issue. Liberia and Sierra Leone are two examples where in the 1990s large sums
of money from “blood diamonds” were squandered on civil wars among gangs that
engaged in gruesome atrocities, many involving amputations of the limbs of
teenage boys and young men. Though there has been mostly peace since then, no
effort was made to construct a working public health service, making both
countries unable to cope with the Ebola outbreak now raging in the region. Life
expectancy in Africa, while rising, is still the world’s shortest, at 56.8
years in the sub-Saharan region, the UN calculates.
Unicef based its new survey
on data and analysis from the United Nations Population Division and the World
Bank, centers of demography and analysis free of the political pressures that
are exerted sometimes by member nations on other UN entities. But systemwide,
UN agencies do not disagree that poverty attends this population boom and could
become more severe, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, where most nations are stuck
at the very bottom of the UN’s annual Human Development Index. Conflict, poor
development work by governments, corruption, violence against women and
stubbornly high fertility — with women’s pleas for family planning often
ignored by officials or rejected by male traditional leaders as culturally
unacceptable — all play their parts in the African demographic story. Of the 34
countries classified by the World Bank in 2014 as having fragile and
conflict-affected contexts, 20 are African, the Unicef survey found.
“About 60 percent of the
African population — and 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa — survives on less
than US$2 a day. Extreme poverty is also rife on the continent; around 40
percent of Africa’s population, and almost half (48 percent) of sub-Saharan
Africa live on less US$1.25 per day.”
Three West African
countries are singled out for attention because they are projected to have very
high rates of population growth: Nigeria, Niger and Mali. Nigeria is Africa’s
most populous country, with about 174 million people, and impoverished Niger
and Mali, with much smaller populations, nonetheless have the highest fertility
rates in the world — 7.6 live births per woman in Niger, 6.9 births in Mali.
Some African leaders still fall back on hopes of a “demographic dividend,” with
large numbers of young people joining in building national economies.
Unicef warns: “Unless
investment in the continent’s children is prioritized, the sheer burden of
population expansion has the potential to undermine attempts to eradicate
poverty through economic growth, and worse, could result in rising poverty and
marginalization of many if economic growth were to falter.”
The status of African girls
was addressed in another Unicef report in early September, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” which covered many
forms of violence against children in 190 countries. It found that Nigeria had
the world’s highest number of child homicides: 13,000. This year, the
government and its experienced military were not able to find and free more
than 200 girls kidnapped from their schools by Islamic militants four months
ago. While about half of girls between 15 and 19 years old surveyed worldwide
said they believed a husband was justified in hitting his wife under certain
circumstances, the percentage rose to over 80 percent in Mali, a sign of low
self-regard.
Unicef’s Africa demographic
report in August, “Generation 2030,” listed child marriages among practices
detrimental to girls that are holding back progress.”Expanded programs to end
child marriage (defined as a union in which one or both parties are under age
18), which is highly prevalent across the continent, must also be included as
part of efforts to address Africa’s demographic transition,” the agency advised.
On Sept. 5, a panel
assembled at UN headquarters addressed the issue of child brides and the forced
marriages of children. In the program, Girls Not Brides, panel participants from
around the world looked for post-2015 development priorities and policies to
end these widely practiced abuses of human rights, which usually result in
girls being denied formal education, and greatly increase their vulnerability
to death at an early age from premature (for their age) pregnancies or sexually
transmitted infections. Unicef estimates that there are 700 million women alive
today who were married before the age of 18. Almost a third of them before they
were 15.
Among the experts speaking
on the panel discussing child brides was John Hendra, the deputy director for
policy and program at UN Women. He wrote to PassBlue after the event, saying:
“As we heard from many speakers, child marriage has very clear impacts on
development outcomes, but as importantly, child, early and forced marriage is a
fundamental breach of the right to enter into marriage with free and full
consent, and an extreme manifestation of gender inequality and structural, gender-based
discrimination.” He added that this practice “violates girls’ rights and
undermines girls’ and young women’s independence and autonomy.”
Looking ahead to new
development policies, post-2015, Hendra said: “In the context of post-2015,
there is simply no way we can achieve development goals, or realize the human
rights of women and girls — both of which are intricately linked — while this
harmful and very discriminatory practice continues. . . . It’s very important
that ending child marriage be explicitly mentioned — as it is now in target
three of Goal 5 — [and] that it be clear that it is not in any way optional,
and that it is measurable. Putting indicators in place to measure progress is
critical to hold governments to account.”
Countries, he added, “have
an obligation to allocate sufficient funding to ensure that laws and policies
are effectively implemented, as well as to support awareness raising and
interventions that empower girls and women and protect their rights.”
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