Over the last decade, the earlier impressive progress of Swaziland in human development has been reversed, concludes UNICEFs draft country programme document on the situation of children and women in the tiny southern African Kingdom.
The draft will be presented to the UNICEF Executive Board Second regular session 2005 on 28-30 September.
The document goes on:
The Governments Smart Programme for Enhanced Economic Development, launched in 2004, includes a call for action to address HIV/AIDS, economic stagnation, corruption, youth unemployment, the care and education of orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs), and the perilous position of national finances. Addressing these
challenging issues will tax the capacities of Government, communities and families alike.
The ranking of Swaziland as a low middle-income country limits its access to concessional loans and assistance. The country has one of the worlds highest Gini coefficients, at 0,61. Ten per cent of its 1,1 million population controls over 40 per cent of the wealth, while 69 per cent of its people live below the poverty line at 70 US cent (4,25 DKR) per day, up from 66 per cent in 1997, according to national statistics.
Changes in global trade rules and in regional comparative advantages are hammering the countrys economic prospects from without, while AIDS is undermining foundations of social capital from within. Illnesses undermine the productivity and competitiveness of the formal sector, while health and funeral costs consume family capital required for livelihood activities.
The economy has stagnated since the early 1990s, and since 2000 progress towards the Millennium Development Goals has been in reverse gear. Under-5 mortality has risen from 90 to 153 per 1.000 live births since 1999, while life expectancy has declined from 57 to 35 years in the last decade, as reported in national statistics.
Approximately 40 per cent of children are stunted (hæmmede i deres udvikling), and 12 per cent are undernourished, according to a 2002 food security assessment. Rural access to safe water, measured at 41 per cent in 2000, has seen little progress in coverage since the 1980s.
Drought has affected more than one third of the country since 2001, deepening poverty and vulnerability, and forcing the Government to declare an emergency in February 2004.
The real emergency countrywide is rooted in the worlds most severe HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV prevalence among pregnant women grew steadily from 3,9 percent in 1992 to 42,6 percent in 2004. More than 200.000 people are living with HIV (2004), and over 4.000 infections occur annually in infants.
As AIDS decimates an entire generation in the 20-49 age group, extended family social safety nets are being stretched to the breaking point, and in some families only the vulnerable elderly and children are left alive.
The number of orphaned children in the country has increased from an estimated 12.000 in 1999, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to 69.000 in 2004, as reported by the Central Statistics Office, and many other vulnerable children are left to the care of elderly, rural relatives while parents seek urban employment.
UNICEF community surveys consistently find one third or more of children in the
category of OVCs. They are food-insecure, cut off from basic health services and sometimes from education and left with parents or relatives who are ill, abusive, or vulnerable themselves.
The impact of the epidemic has not yet peaked: among pregnant women aged 25-29, HIV prevalence in 2004 was 56 per cent, according to a sentinel survey.
The results for children are ominous: expanding school dropout; deteriorating nutritional status; breakdown of non-formal family and community institutions; and signs of social breakdown in the form of violence, rape, abuse, and abandonment of infants.
The most vulnerable have a greater risk of HIV infection. Imaginative and large-scale action to intervene and establish safety nets can stop such a destructive cycle,
but it is a race against time.
Kilde: Swaziland newsletter 20, v. Patrick Mac Manus
