Eight reasons why I’m worried, and hopeful, about the next generation As temperatures increase and water becomes scarcer it is children who will feel the deadliest impact of waterborne and other diseases

Henrietta Fore Our Children, Our Future

Dear children of today and of tomorrow,

Thirty years ago, against the backdrop of a changing world order — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decline of apartheid, the birth of the world wide web — the world united in defence of children and childhood.

While most of the world’s parents at the time had grown up under dictatorships or failing governments, they hoped for better lives, greater opportunities and more rights for their children.

So, when leaders came together in 1989 in a moment of rare global unity to make a historic commitment to the world’s children to protect and fulfil their rights, there was a real sense of hope for the next generation.

So how much progress have we made?

In the three decades following the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in spite of an exploding global population, we have reduced the number of children missing out on primary school by almost 40 per cent.

The number of stunted children under five years of age dropped by over 100 million. Three decades ago, polio paralysed or killed almost 1 000 children every day.

Today, 99 percent of those cases have been eliminated.

Many of the interventions behind this progress — such as vaccines, oral rehydration salts and better nutrition — have been practical and cost-effective.

The rise of digital and mobile technology and other innovations have made it easier and more efficient to deliver critical services in hard-to reach communities and to expand opportunities.

Yet poverty, inequality, discrimination and distance continue to deny millions of children their rights every year, as 15 000 children under five still die every day, mostly from treatable diseases and other preventable causes.

We are facing an alarming rise in overweight children, but also girls suffering from anaemia.

The stubborn challenges of open defecation and child marriage continue to threaten children’s health and futures.

Whilst the numbers of children in school are higher than ever, the challenge of achieving quality education is not being met.

Being in school is not the same as learning; more than 60 percent of primary school children in developing countries still fail to achieve minimum proficiency in learning and half the world’s teens face violence in and around school, so it doesn’t feel like a place of safety.

Conflicts continue to deny children the protection, health and futures they deserve. The list of ongoing child rights challenges is long.

And your generation, the children of today, are facing a new set of challenges and global shifts that were unimaginable to your parents.

Our climate is changing beyond recognition. Inequality is deepening. Technology is transforming how we perceive the world. And more families are migrating than ever before. Childhood has changed, and we need to change our approaches along with it.

So, as we look back on 30 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we should also look ahead, to the next 30 years.

We must listen to you — today’s children and young people — about the issues of greatest concern to you now and begin working with you on twenty-first century solutions to 21st century problems.

With that in mind, here are eight reasons why I’m worried for your future, and eight reasons why I think there is hope:

  1. You need clean water, clean air and a safe climate

Why I’m worried: It sounds obvious that all children need these basics to sustain healthy lives — a clean environment to live in, clean air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat — and it sounds strange to be making this point in 2019.

Yet climate change has the potential to undermine all of these basic rights and indeed most of the gains made in child survival and development over the past 30 years. There is perhaps no greater threat facing the rights of the next generation of children.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted last year that climate change is becoming a key force behind the recent continued rise in global hunger, and as escalating droughts and flooding degrade food production, the next generation of children will bear the greatest burden of hunger and malnutrition. We are already seeing evidence of extreme weather events driven by climate change creating more frequent and more destructive natural disasters, and while future forecasts vary, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the most frequently cited number of environmental migrants expected worldwide by 2050 is 200 million, with estimates as high as 1 billion.

As temperatures increase and water becomes scarcer it is children who will feel the deadliest impact of waterborne diseases.

Today, more than half a billion children live in areas with extremely high flood occurrence and almost 160 million in high-drought severity zones. Regions like the Sahel, which are especially reliant on agriculture, grazing and fishing, are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In this arid region, rains are projected to get even shorter and less predictable in the future, and alarmingly, the region is warming up at a rate one and a half times faster than the global average.

In the Sahel, the climate gets hotter and the poor get poorer, and it is all too common for armed groups to exploit the social grievances that arise under such pressurized conditions.

These challenges will only be compounded by the impact of air pollution, toxic waste and groundwater pollution damaging children’s health.

In 2017 approximately 300 million children were living in areas with the most toxic levels of outdoor air pollution — six or more times higher than international guidelines, and it contributes to the deaths of around 600 000 children under the age of five. Even more will suffer lasting damage to their developing brains and lungs.

And, by 2040, one in four children will live in areas of extreme water stress and thousands will be made sick by polluted water. The management and protection of clean, plentiful, accessible groundwater supplies, and the management of plastic waste are very fast becoming defining child health issues for our time.

Why there is hope: To mitigate climate change, governments and business must work together to tackle the root causes by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

Meanwhile, we must give the highest priority to efforts to find adaptations that reduce environmental impacts on children.

UNICEF works to curb the impact of extreme weather events including by designing water systems that can withstand cyclones and salt-water contamination; strengthening school structures and supporting preparedness drills; and supporting community health systems. Innovations such as Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) schemes — if deployed at scale — could preserve reservoirs of clean water to protect millions of children from the dangers of water scarcity and disease.

 

Even in complex environments like the Sahel, there is hope — it has a young population, hungry for work and opportunity, and the climate offers vast potential for harnessing renewable, sustainable energy sources.

With investment in education and employment opportunities, improved security and governance, there is every reason to feel optimism for the region’s ability to develop climate change resilience and adaptation.

To turn the tide on air pollution, governments and business must work hand in hand to reduce fossil fuel consumption, develop cleaner agricultural, industrial and transport systems and invest in scaling renewable energy sources.

Many governments have taken action to curb pollution from power plants, industrial facilities and road vehicles with strict regulations.

A 2011 study by the United States Environmental Protection Agency found that the country’s 1990 Clean Air Act had delivered US$30 of health benefits to citizens for every US$1 spent. Such policies hold the key to protecting little lungs and babies’ brains from damaging airborne pollutants and particulate matter.

In the meantime, it is vital that we search for solutions that can ameliorate the worst effects of air pollution on child health.

Mongolia’s capital city Ulaanbaatar has among the most polluted air in the world during winter. The biggest source of pollution comes from coal-burning used by 60 per cent of Ulaanbaatar’s population. UNICEF innovation experts together with the community, government, academia and the private sector have begun to design and implement energy efficiency solutions for traditional homes to reduce coal consumption and improve air quality, including by designing “the 21st Century Ger”.

And we are finding ways to recycle and reuse plastics in innovative ways as well, reducing toxic waste and putting rubbish to good use.

Conceptos Plasticos, a Colombian social enterprise, has developed a technique to make bricks out of non-PVC plastics that are cheaper, lighter and more durable than conventional bricks — and is using them to build classrooms. Africa’s first recycled plastic classroom was built earlier this year in Côte d’Ivoire, in just a few weeks.

It cost 30 percent less than traditional classrooms. This innovative approach of transforming plastic waste into construction bricks has the potential to turn a plastic waste management challenge into an opportunity, by addressing the right to an education with the construction of schools, empowering these communities and cleaning up the environment at the same time.

  1. One in four of you are likely to live, and learn, in conflict and disaster zones

Why I’m worried: Children have always been the first victims of war. Today, the number of countries experiencing conflict is the highest it has ever been since the adoption of the Child Rights Convention in 1989.

One in four children now live in countries affected by violent fighting or disaster, with 28 million children driven from their homes by wars and insecurity. Many lose several years of school — as well as records of achievements and qualifications for future learning and careers.

Conflicts and natural disasters have already disrupted learning for 75 million children and young people, many of whom have migrated across borders or been displaced. That is a personal tragedy for every single child.

To abandon the aspirations of a whole generation is a terrible waste of human potential. Worse, creating a lost, disillusioned and angry generation of uneducated children is a dangerous risk that could cost us all.

Why there is hope: Some states have demonstrated effective policies to keep refugees learning. When large numbers of children escaping the war in the Syrian Arab Republic arrived in Lebanon, the government faced the challenge of accommodating hundreds of thousands of children in a public-school system already under strain.

With the support of international partners, they turned that challenge into an opportunity and integrated refugee children into schools while strengthening the education system for Lebanese students at the same time.

And digital innovations can help us do more. UNICEF is collaborating with Microsoft and the University of Cambridge to develop a “learning passport” — a digital platform that will facilitate learning opportunities for children and young people within and across borders.

The learning passport is being tested and piloted in countries hosting refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons.

A digitally inclusive world should allow young people, no matter their situation, to get access to education. Scaling up solutions like the digital learning passport could help millions of displaced children gain the skills they need to thrive.

  1. We must make it OK to talk about mental health

Why I’m worried: If we believed everything we read about teenagers today, and the images portrayed in television and film, we could be forgiven for thinking they are a wild, antisocial bunch.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence actually shows that teens today smoke less, drink less, get into less trouble and generally take fewer risks than previous generations. You might even call them Generation Sensible.

Yet there is one area of risk for adolescents showing an extremely worrisome trend in the wrong direction – one that reminds us of the invisible vulnerability that young people still carry inside of them. Mental health disorders among under 18s have been rising steadily over the past 30 years and depression is now among the leading causes of disability in the young.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 62 000 adolescents died in 2016 because of self-harm, which is now the third leading cause of death for adolescents aged 15–19.

This is not just a rich country problem — WHO estimates that more than 90 per cent of adolescent suicides in 2016 were in low or middle-income countries.

And while young people with severe mental disorders in lower-income countries often miss out on treatment and support, there is no country in the world that can claim to have conquered this challenge.

To quote the WHO’s mental health expert Shekhar Saxena, “when it comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries.” With most low-income and middle-income countries spending less than 1 per cent of their total health budget on mental health, and high-income countries just 4–5 percent, it is clear that it needs greater priority around the world.

UNICEF works with children who have suffered unthinkable traumas, gender discrimination, extreme poverty, sexual violence, disability and chronic illness, living through conflict and other experiences that place them at high risk of mental distress.

The cost is not only personal, it is societal — the World Economic Forum consistently ranks mental health as having one of the greatest economic burdens of any non-communicable health issue.

Despite this overwhelming evidence of a looming crisis and the alarming trends in rising self-harm and suicide rates, adolescent mental health and well-being have often been overlooked in global health programming.

Why there is hope: With half of lifetime mental health disorders starting before age 14, age-appropriate mental health promotion, prevention, and therapeutic treatment and rehabilitation must be prioritised.

Early detection and treatment are key to preventing episodes of mental distress reaching a crisis point and precious young lives being damaged and lost.

But all too often, what stands in the way of young people seeking help at an early stage is the ongoing stigma and taboo that prevents communities talking openly about mental health problems. Fortunately, this taboo is beginning to fall, and young people, once again, are leading the way — founding non-governmental organisations, developing apps, raising awareness, and being vocal about their own struggles with mental illness and their efforts to address their condition, in hope that others feel empowered to do the same.

UNICEF uses campaigns in schools to promote open discussion about mental health. For example, in Kazakhstan, which has one of the highest suicide rates among adolescents worldwide, UNICEF stepped up efforts to improve the mental well-being of adolescents through a large-scale pilot programme in over 450 schools.

The programme raised awareness, trained staff to identify high-risk cases, and ensured referral of vulnerable adolescents to health specialists. Nearly 50 000 young people participated in the pilot with many significant improvements in well-being.

The programme has since been scaled up to over 3 000 schools.

The prioritisation of adolescent mental health promotion and suicide prevention has resulted in a 51 percent decrease of self-injury mortality in the 15–17 years age group at the national level and the number of suicide cases decreased from 212 in 2013 to 104 in 2018 for this age group.

And perhaps most importantly, mental health is now being integrated into mainstream primary health care services, helping to overcome the stigma which often puts young people off from seeking help.

Henrietta Fore is UNICEF’s Executive Director. She writes the opinion on the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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