Niko Kyriakou

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 28 2005 (IPS) — Children’s advocates are seeking to turn up the pressure on the World Bank to include children’s rights in its poverty reduction strategies, used by some 70 low-income countries.

Under the World Bank’s current model for poverty reduction, any country seeking assistance from the bank or its sister agency, the International Monetary Fund, must draft a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). The papers should prioritise ”macroeconomic, structural, and social” strategies to reduce poverty using input from civil society, according to the lending agency’s Web site.

But for years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and U.N. agencies have complained of being unable to get the bank to fund a number of socially related projects that protect the rights of children.

That difficulty has been among the signs that ”the world power structure is not organized in favor of kids,” said Annie Leatt, a programme manager at the Children’s Institute in South Africa who took part in a conference here this week on children and poverty.

Children’s rights are broadly defined in Article 27 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as ”the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.” The United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world not to have ratified the treaty.

One billion of the world’s 2.2 billion children currently live in poverty and 3,900 die every day because they lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.

Participants in the conference, which ended late Wednesday, urged the World Bank to focus its programmes on services required to keep people out of poverty in the long run, and not simply on boosting poor families’ incomes.

Education, for example, can break the cycle of poverty that passes between generations, said Rosalia Cortes, principal researcher at the Latin American social scientists’ association FLACSO. However, she added, the bank’s strategies do not help poor families develop the environment necessary for their children to attend school regularly

”In Latin America, poverty and welfare programmes don’t address these issues. They just transfer money to the head of the household” with no way to ensure how the money is spent, Cortes said.

While this system ”has contained social unrest,” new studies show it has not raised school attendance nor increased job opportunities over the long term, she added.

The result ”is a continuation of a long-term pattern of low education, low skill, and low opportunity for employment,” circumstances which then transfer to the children, Cortes said.

Howard White, senior evaluation officer in the bank’s internal evaluation department, acknowledged that PRSPs are not based on a child rights model and said reference to children’s rights likely could not be found in the strategy papers.

”On the other hand, I would say that approach is implicit,” White told IPS. While some people use the concept of children’s rights to include things like abolishing child labour, White said, the bank’s broad focus ”is on the things that matter most.”

”For example, Bangladesh has reducing under-five mortality as one of the goals of the PRSP, and reducing child malnutrition,” he said, adding that ”the biggest deprivation is having your children die.”

White further said that there might be some countries with specific groups of children that fall out of the Bank’s reach. He largely attributed this to flawed data.

The bank bases its poverty strategy in large part on income-related poverty data gathered by household. This results in ”incomplete poverty analysis,” White said, because it does not include poor children not living in households. For example, ”a bank survey in Mauritania did not cover nomads or street children,” he said.

This is the ”nature of the way data is collected” White said, and is not a matter of oversight. Children missed by the data, he added, while varying between countries, only amount to a maximum of 5 percent of the population..

White suggested that if people wish to raise other children’s issues, these should be dealt with outside the PRSP framework. If this is not possible, then ”perhaps the PRSP should take notice of other issues,” he added.

Children’s rights advocates, however, said the PRSP model had become their focus largely because it casts a shadow over virtually every aspect of development policymaking at country level.

Their governments would not look at programmes that did not fit the PRSP model, they said, so how could NGOs and U.N. agencies work on children’s rights outside that framework?

”PRSPs may not be perfect but within this imperfection lies the space to do something,” said Jeffrey Maganya, an advisor on poverty, social, and economic rights to The Cradle, a Kenya-based children’s foundation.

”When money gets allocated to a ministry you have a space. All policies get interpreted then implemented,” Maganya said. But first, ”they have to decide on the definition of ‘poor’ or of ‘marginalisation’. At that stage, let’s be there to tell them what is ‘poor’. Then you don’t have to wait for the World Bank to review the poverty reduction report two or three years down the line.”

There also is some hope of closer cooperation between the bank and U.N. agencies. Uganda’s PRSP, for example, is linked not only to national poverty reduction goals but also to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which broadly address child poverty, said Monique Segarra, an international development specialist and professor at U.S.-based Vassar College.