13th December, 2004

More than half the world’s children are suffering “extreme deprivations” as a result of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, according to a report from global child welfare agency UNICEF.

The organisation’s 10th annual State of the World's Children report reveals that 640 million children to not have adequate shelter; 500 million children have no access to sanitation; 400 million children have no access to safe water and 90 million children are severely food deprived.

The report also shows almost half of the 3.6 million people killed in the 59 armed conflicts which have taken place around the world between 1990 and 2003 have been children with incidents such the Beslan massacre in Russia showing that children were no longer immune from being deliberately targeted.

Elsewhere the report shows that the number of children orphaned as a result of AIDS has grown to 15 million.

Launching the report, UNICEF’s executive director Carol Bellamy said too many governments were making “deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood”.

“Poverty doesn’t come from nowhere; war doesn’t emerge from nothing; AIDS doesn’t spread by choice of its own. These are our choices.”

Bellamy said that with more than a billion children denied the healthy and protected upbringing promised in 1989’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, “we failed to deliver on the promise of childhood”.

- DAVID ADAMS