This was said by Khadija Haq, president of Mahbubal Haq Human Development Centre, at a conference on “Impact of macroeconomic polices on children: past and future trends”, organized by Sparc, an NGO, on Saturday.
According to official statistics, she said, more than 3.3 million children worked as part of one-quarter of the country’s unskilled work force.
Talking about infant mortality rate, she said, although it declined from 139 in 1960 to 84 in 1999, it was still the highest in South Asia.
“Pakistan’s under-five mortality rate is also the highest in South Asia at 112, compared to 98 for India, 19 for Sri Lanka and 84 for Bangladesh”, Ms Haq said.
Besides these gloomy conditions, children are also victims of violence. In 1990s, she said, approximately two million children died throughout the world due to conflicts and many more were left emotionally and physically scarred.
At the end of the decade, she added, about 35 million people were qualified as either refugees or internally displaced individuals, and 80 per cent of these were children and women.
Sexual abuse of children — a matter often hushed up in most of the societies — is increasingly being discussed these days because of the testimonies being given by the abused children. An estimated 30 million children around the world are victims of sexual abuse, Ms Haq said.
She termed globalization as the major factor behind the increasing gulf within and among nations. “In 1990, annual income per person in high-income countries was about 56 times greater than that in low-income countries, but in 1999 the difference shot up to 63 times greater”, she said.
Despite a $30 trillion global economy, half of the world population (three billion) subsists on less than two dollars a day, and 1.2 billion of them are children.
Ms Haq said progressive elimination of child labour was now the overall goal with strategies focussing on awareness raising, dissemination of information and children’s education and skill development.
High-quality and compulsory primary education can be the keys to unlock the prison cell of exploitative child labour, but, any plan to put working children back in schools must shatter the existing myths.
Creating an effective educational system is likely to have a more far-reaching impact on child labour, Ma Haq said, adding that 24 per cent of children in Pakistan did not attend school, because the low-quality education could not offer them useful skills in future.
The enormous debt burden on Pakistan is one of the reasons why money has been diverted from children’s survival and development to debt servicing. In Pakistan, less than two per cent of the GDP is spent on education.
Ms Carrol C.Long, Unicef representative, in her speech, said, since 1984, Unicef’s discussions with the IMF and the World Bank had agreed on certain points.
First, it was not the IMF itself and its policies, rather the difficult economic situations faced by many developing countries, that were the major cause of pressure on children and other vulnerable groups of the societies.
Second one was that the adjustment policies in response to these difficult economic situations often aggravated already critical situation, especially for children, she added.
Third point, the Unicef representative said, was requirement of broadening of traditional adjustment policies so that venerable groups such as women and children could be benefited.
Lastly, it was agreed by all that there were no reason — theoretical or practical — why adjustment policies needed to or should neglect human concerns, especially the ones about children.
Arno Keller of Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, an NGO, said, people all round the world were killing one another in the name of religion.
Alf Arne of Norwegian embassy, who had recently been appointed to Pakistan, said, in terms of planning, Pakistan was at top, but, when it came to implementation nothing had been done.
Federal women development minister Dr Attiya Inayatullah, speaking on the occasion, said the overindulgent policies of Bretton Woods institutions were reason behind the slow development of social sector around the world.
She said the whole world had entered 21st century with one billion illiterate people, and two third of them were women and children.
Earlier, in his welcome speech, Anees Jillani of Sparc said the failure of state with regard to the provision of basic rights to its children could be gauged from the fact that millions of children still grew up malnourished.