This would ordinarily make heartwarming reading, would it not? Trouble, however, is that there have been promising but largely unworkable plans of the kind on so many numerous occasions over the years that one would be excused to doubt whether the efforts will bear any better fruit this time around than previously.
According to UNICEF, a child in Tanzania is said to be living in poverty if she or he suffers deprivation in three or more of the said eight key dimensions of poverty.
Basing on a national survey conducted in 2012/2013, a joint report by the UN agency and Tanzania’s own National Bureau of Statistics shows that 74 per cent of the country’s children experience multidimensional poverty and 29 per cent are affected by what is known as monetary poverty.
The picture is not that gloomy or hopeless, though, as child poverty is complex but is not all about money and social sector interventions including investing in parental and early child education always come in handy.
As Tanzania wages its own war on child and other forms of poverty, it obviously finds comfort in the fact that it is not without allies – with the likes of the UN time and again chipping in with various kinds of assistance.
The implementation of the universally endorsed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which “took over” from the eight Millennium Development Goals, point to a case in point in this particular respect.
The challenges targeted during the implementation of the global goals paint a macabre picture. Examples: one in every five people in developing countries lives on less than US1.25 per day, poor nutrition causes 45 per cent of deaths of under-fives – 3.1 million children – each year, and 66 million primary school-age children in developing countries attend classes hungry – with 23 million in Africa alone.
While it may be argued that the lot of our children has improved appreciably in recent decades, a sober analysis of the situation in specific setting would likely come up with completely different findings.
For instance, there are pockets in some urban slums or even supposedly middle-class residential areas where basic needs such as clean and safe tap water is hard to come by and it is not always that the state of environmental hygiene lives up to popular expectations.
By what may be perceived as logical extension, most rural areas fare much worse on these and other scores, among them access to reliable power supply and environmentally friend sources of energy as well as medical services and supplies.
Experts have made it possible for the citizenry to know what they were all along supposed to know, including that current levels of poverty predict future levels of poverty.
We also know that children languishing in poverty will often find themselves unable to reach or realise their full potential later in life. And what a treacherous growth path that would come to!
Accordingly, we feel compelled to echo UNICEF’s sentiments on the matter – that multidimensional poverty is not about simply counting the number of children living in poor households. Rather, it is about “analysing specific dimensions of poverty and their causes to piece together a fuller picture of a child’s quality of life”.
In this, the nation needs to come together and wage a joint war on the factors impeding the realisation of the development goals we have set for ourselves as part of a global strategy to makes the lives of people better. As long argued, few investments support worthier causes than does ensuring that children lead meaningful and gainful lives.
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