Unicef says Africa’s humanity ignored

Press, 13 December 1985, Page 6

Unicef says Africa’s humanity ignored

NZPA-Reuter Nairobi Short-term economic reforms adopted in Africa, often at the urging of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have often aggravated Africa’s economic and human crisis, said the United Nations Children’s Fund yesterday. It said that development had tended to ignore the human factor.

Unicef said that partly as a result of narrowly conceived reforms, “children and their mothers in sub-Saharan Africa are less healthy than in any other major region of the world.” “While steady progress is being made in other regions, the situation in Africa appears to be either stagnant or deteriorating,” it said in a report. The report quoted a United States survey that

found that even before the recent drought, 17 million sub-Saharan African children aged .under five, or 25 per cent of the total, were malnourished. “These numbers certainly have increased in recent years in the worst-hit countries,” the report said. Economic measures had laid emphasis on improving the balance of payments and repaying the debts of impoverished African countries at the expense of boosting employment and social services. “Ironically, the result has often been an aggravation of the economic crisis and a parallel human crisis as unemployment rises, incomes of the most vulnerable groups fall, importdependent industries cut production, public services are curtailed and public discontent and political instability grow.”

Unicef said that when due attention was paid to the human factor, results were often impressive. In Zimbabwe, peasant farmers had produced 500,000 tonnes of maize above their immediate needs last year because for the first time they had received high-yielding seed, had been offered credit, and were paid a good price for their crops, it said. Child health could also be drastically improved at relatively low cost if its immunisation and oral dehydration programmes were fully implemented. Africa suffered less from disparities in land ownership than Asia and Latin America and its tradition of subsistence farming “has endowed Africans with a unique resilience and a way of coping with unpredictable natural disasters,” said Unicef.