UNITED NATIONS, (IPS) -- Investment in
early childhood care and development is one of the most effective methods
to fight poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflict and inequality in the developing world,
the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said here today.
"The rights of children and the cause of
human development are unassailable reasons for investing in early childhood,"
the agency said in its State of the World's Children 2001 report. Declaring
that "investment in the development and care of our youngest children is
the most fundamental form of good leadership," Carol Bellamy, executive
director of UNICEF, argued that the world is squandering human potential
on a massive scale as hundreds of millions of the world's youngest citizens
flounder in poverty and neglect in their first years of life.
Eighty billion dollars per year are necessary
to give every newborn in the world a good start in life, according to UNICEF,
and Bellamy stresses that, "investments made today will yield high returns
to children and society in the future" through faster paced development
as well as savings in remedial education, health care and rehabilitation.
For every dollar spent on early childhood
care there is a $7 return through cost savings, the new 116-page report
said, highlighting the pioneering early investment programs in Sweden,
Cuba and the United States. The report points to the urgent need to ensure
that early childhood development programs are child-centered, family-focused
and community-based and combine health, nutrition, hygiene, water and environmental
sanitation and education.
"The greatest tragedy," Bellamy stresses,
"is that many decision-makers simply don't know how crucial those first
three years of life are." "Unleashing children's brain power through effective
investments in health, nutrition, education, child care and basic protection
is both a moral imperative and sound economics," Bellamy declared. "But
those investments must happen early -- early enough in a child's life to
take advantage of that unique moment in human development."
A growing body of knowledge attests to
the fact that during the first 36 months of a child's life, brain connections
multiply and the motor that will fire the child's thinking and behavior
patterns for the rest of his or her life is formed.
As children learn to speak, feel, walk
and reason, the value system against which they will judge good and bad,
fair and unfair is also formed. "This is the most vulnerable period in
a person's life and one that demands the most care from society," the report
said.
Poor, malnourished and weak children make
for a poor and powerless state. The report notes that in the poorest nations,
scarce resources are used to pay loans. By investing in destructive war
machines, many countries steal food, clean water, health care and schooling
from their citizens.
The State of the World's Children 2001
implores the global community to invest in its children as the best hope
for overcoming the scourges of poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS pandemic
which has stripped health and education budgets to the bone in sub-Saharan
Africa.
Approximately 129 million children were
born last year, of these "almost 11 million died in the same year, most
from easily preventable causes," according to UNICEF.
In 1998, the top five child killers were:
perinatal conditions, 20 percent; respiratory infections, 18 percent; diarrhoeal
diseases, 17 percent; vaccine-preventable diseases, 15 percent; and malaria,
7 percent. "Childhood poverty is insidious and immoral. Child by child,
mind by mind, it leads to a vast loss of human capacity," Bellamy said.
A U.N. Special Session on Children will
take place in September 2001 as a follow-up to the World Summit for Children.
World leaders will convene in New York to review the progress made over
the last decade. UNICEF asserts that in order for a new agenda with respect
to children's rights for the new millennium world leaders must recommit
themselves, without reservation, excuse or equivocation, to the Convention
on the Rights of the Child and must make children -- especially the youngest
-- the priority at all policy tables, in all program planning and all budget
meetings.