IRIN Focus on children of war

Angola’s long and brutal civil war has robbed millions of children of their youth and their futures. Statistics indicate that long after Angola extricates itself from its internecine conflict, its youth will continue to pay dearly. Two years ago the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) described Angola as “the country whose children are at the greatest risk of death, malnutrition, abuse and development failure”. Not much has changed since then. Angola has a young population - 45 percent of its estimated 12 million people are under 15 years old, more than 70 percent are under 30. They are paying the price of a war that has reduced the country’s health, education, justice and social structures to ruins. In its report to a conference earlier this year on the world’s least developed countries, the Angolan government said its education system had always encountered difficulties, particularly since the resumption of civil war in 1992 - after the UNITA opposition rejected the ruling MPLA’s victory at the polls. “This explains the deterioration or the advanced state of disrepair in which existing school infrastructures can be found, the quantitative and qualitative scarcity of teachers, high failure rates and the illiteracy rate of 42 percent,” the report said. It added that 70 percent of children between six and 14 years old ran the risk of being illiterate. While some teaching at under-staffed and under-equipped schools takes place in the provinces, the only place in Angola where children stand a chance of getting an adequate education is Luanda, the capital. And even here, the constraints are immense. The government has not been able to accommodate the large numbers of war-displaced or starving families arriving in the city to live with extended families or to look for work. Education crisis An Oxfam report on primary school education in Luanda found a severe lack of classroom space, high teacher/pupil ratios (1-80 in some cases), wastage because of high failure and drop-out rates, the lack of trained teaching staff (only 48 percent of primary school teachers in Luanda are adequately trained), and lack of learning and teaching materials (teachers and pupils have to buy their own). With an official global poverty rate of about 67 percent, not many parents can afford all the costs associated with sending their children to school. By the end of 2000, official statistics indicated that only about 45 percent of Angola’s children of school-going age were in class. Far too many children are dying in Angola, however, even before they reach school-going age. According to government statistics, 35 percent of the country’s children are malnourished, the maternal mortality rate stands at about 2 percent, the birth-rate is 49 percent with a gross mortality rate of about 19 percent and child mortality is well over 17 percent. The mortality rate for children under five years old is almost 30 percent - higher than in most other developing countries. And in some areas, like in the Bie Provincial capital of Kuito, where hundreds of families are converging in search of security and food, a global malnutrition rate of 46 percent has been recorded among infants. Dr Joaquim Carlos van Dunem, a doctor at the Luanda Paediatric Hospital, told IRIN that malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and respiratory infections killed the majority of children in Angola. The hospital, the only one of its kind in Angola, treats about 350 children each day. About 80 of them need to be hospitalised for urgent treatment, but its facilities and resources are limited. “And you can image,” said the doctor, “this is supposed to be the biggest and best hospital for children, so we get patients from all over the country. The resource here are little, but in the provinces they are nil and there are very low attendance rates at the few government health posts which remain functional.” Health horrors The hospital itself is in a sorry state. With only 300 beds, there is never enough space to admit every child who needs urgent treatment. As a result, it is common to see three or four seriously ill children sharing a tiny bed in the casualty section’s high care unit at any given time. And even though staff do what they can, the unit itself is unsightly. The choking stench of urine and faeces permeates the air, flies buzz around the sick children and it is overcrowded - the very conditions one could say, which forced the children into hospital in the first place. There are not enough drugs either. “We have enough drugs until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. each night. We expect about 350 children a day, but sometimes the number is higher. For example, the hospital only has about 40 or 50 quinine injections to treat malaria each day and most of our young patients have malaria,” said Van Dunem, who was the only doctor on duty at the busy outpatients section the day IRIN visited. Asked whether he had ever lost a child because of the shortage of drugs and equipment, he said: “Our philosophy is that we can’t say we don’t have drugs. We have to do something to save the child. There are some constraints, but we cannot say this to parents because they come to the hospital for help.” Many of the parents sleep on pavements outside the hospital, using fires to cook food for their children - the hospital does not provide meals to children in its wards. Recent news reports that 25 children a day were dying at the hospital prompted an investigation into the conditions there. The government’s health ministry is still assessing the problem. However, Angola’s government spends only about 10 percent of its annual budget on the “social sector”, that is on things like health and education. The majority of this money goes to salaries and administrative costs, so virtually no money is spent on providing new services or improving old ones. According to a senior UN aid worker in Luanda, Angola will have to spend much more than it does at the moment on social services, and much less on war, if it wants to improve its children’s health and education prospects. For now a number of international and national non-governmental organisations supplement government services where they can. Some provide services where the government does not do so, like in Kuito, the capital of Bie Province, where a global malnutrition rate of 46 percent has been recorded among children being treated in Medecins Sans Frontieres therapeutic feeding centres. The war generation Even more worrying though is the direct impact Angola’s war is having on its children. While the breakdown of government infrastructure and social structures have led to millions of children suffering, it is estimated that at least 300,000 children have been forced into combat in Angola by rebel and government armed forces. Those who have survived say they are used to fight, to work in military camps, transport heavy loads on their backs as soldiers move location, and also as sex slaves. According to UNICEF’s Lidia Borba, who works in child protection services, about 1 million Angolan children have lost one parent in the war and almost 300,000 have lost both parents. In addition, more than 1 million children across the country are believed to have no access at all to education and health facilities. “In general,” she told IRIN, “all children are direct or indirect victims of this war. Not a single family has not been affected.” On 1 June about 2,000 children in Luanda marched in protest against the use of children in war. The first of its kind, the march placed firmly in the public eye the trauma Angola’s youngsters are living through. Reverend Daniel Ntoni-Nzinga, a leading religious figure in Angola, estimated it would take about 500 years for Angola’s children to get a “fair chance at life” and for Angola’s people to recover from a war which has lasted for three decades. “This means the time is now, the time has come for us to start thinking about the future we are giving our children,” he told IRIN. “Most of them know nothing but war and we have to ask if this is the life we want our children and their children to lead forever?” In the meantime, the children of Angola continue to die from diseases associated with poverty and a lack of education. They remain illiterate, they continue to be torn from their families and forced into military combat and they continue to find themselves on the streets, helping to make ends meet for their families.