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| Migrant families pitch camp next to a railway line in Delhi, while they look for work, India. ©Raghu Rai:Magnum for Save the Children |
As a group that are often the most
vulnerable to poverty and its detriments, children were a central
focus when the Millennium Development Goals were implemented in 2000.
The eight goal plan adopted by World
leaders at the UN Millennium Summit in New York has arguably been a
success, having facilitated huge progress in dealing with a number of
the world's biggest challenges.
In the last decade, the number of
people suffering from extreme poverty fell from almost 2 billion to
less than 1.3 billion, child mortality dropped to 6.9 million (12
million in 1990) and huge improvements were made in school enrolment.
Research from the World Bank shows that in 1981,
almost three-fourths of citizens in the developing world lived on
less than $2 a day – this rate has dropped dramatically to 43
percent. Their report Inequality in Focus claims
that, “Progress is undeniable”, with preliminary estimates
revealing that positive trends are set to continue. This encouraging
assessment is backed up in part by Justin Forsyth, the Chief
Executive of Save the Children who recently stated:
Despite the considerable improvements
made to child well-being, the positive figures on show bely the
rapidly growing problem of inequality. In a recent report Born Equal: How reducing inequality could give our children a better future, Save the Children argues that global progress masks a
huge number of disparities. When broken down, national statistics on
poverty reduction, hunger, child mortality show striking imbalances
between rich and poor, urban and rural areas, men and women and
ethnic groups.
The top deciles of populations in
developed and developing countries are getting rapidly richer and the
disproportionate levels of healthcare, nutrition and better access to
school enjoyed by this section of society make it difficult to
provide an accurate picture of whether the progress being made is
benefiting those who need it most. In a TED Talk on economic
inequality and its effects on society, public health researcher
Richard Wilkinson describes the 'extraordinary' disparities between
rich and poor, pointing at a near ten year life expectancy gap
between the wealthy and the impoverished in England and Wales. Born
Equal exemplifies the issue by using the case of
Madagascar, where a striking drop in under-five mortality between the
late 90s and the mid-2000s had been concentrated in the top wealth
quintile:
“While child mortality in the richest
quintile fell from 142 to 49 per 1000 live births, the poorest
quintile saw less progress, with a more modest fall from 195 to 101
per 1000 live births.”
The report stipulates that children
bear the brunt of inequality, demonstrating that in some cases
children born into the richest households have access to 35 times (Born Equal) the
resources of the poorest. Furthermore, child mortality rates are more
than double among the poorest countries and stunting rates can reach
levels six times higher in rural than in urban areas in countries
with noticeable spatial inequalities. Notably, research from the OECD
has shown that for the first time inequality has risen in
traditionally low-inequality countries, such as Germany, Denmark, and
Sweden (and other Nordic countries), where it grew more than anywhere
else in the 2000s. Widening disparities in income have been shown to
compromise a country's economic growth, damage well-being outcomes
and threaten poverty reduction. On a micro level, inequality
threatens the right of every child to have an equal chance to survive
and thrive.
Despite the fact that children are
hardest hit by inequality, little focus has been applied to the
measurement of inequality among them. Born Equal not only lays
out the damaging effects of inequality on children but identifies the
policies and interventions that have successfully dealt with the
problem up until now and then goes further by providing a number of
recommendations for the upcoming post- 2015 framework that will
replace the Millennium Goals. These include a call for a more
equitable approach to the pursuit of development goals through the
disaggregation of targets and indicators by wealth and other forms of
group based inequalities. They also provide suggestions on
progressive taxation and break away from other
major development organisations by being the first to call for a
fight against illicit flows.
The problem of
inequality is transcendent throughout the world and it seems
paramount that while focus is still applied to the current MDGs –
the next generation of these goals must pursue equity in similar
measure. Only by shifting the attention to those who have not
benefited from the current program will its aims be fully achieved.
Justin Forsyth emphasized this necessity when he added:
“Unless inequality is addressed...any
future development framework will simply not succeed in maintaining
or accelerating progress. What’s more, it will hold countries –
and the world – back from experiencing real growth and prosperity.”
Robbie Lawrence
Wikichild Coordinator
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