Half Asia's children `deprived'

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Half Asia's children `deprived'


ANJIRA ASSAVANONDA

Despite Asia's booming economy, almost half the region's 1.27 billion children are living in poverty, deprived of food, safe drinking water, health or shelter, an international development agency said in a report released yesterday.

While 600 million children under the age of 18 lacked access to one of these basic human needs, more than 350 million were deprived of two or more of these needs, according to Growing up in Asia, a report by the child humanitarian organisation Plan.

This was largely due to the pressures of population growth, scarce resources, gender and caste discrimination, dominance by social elites, weak governance and corruption.

Children were also deprived because of the way they were treated by adults and institutions around them. Girls, for example, often did not go to school _ not because schools did not exist, but because of the attitudes of their parents.

Saying that investing in children and their families was the most effective way of breaking the cycle of poverty, the organisation pledged to invest US$1 billion (about 40 billion baht) on poverty reduction across 12 of the poorest Asian countries over the next decade.

The money will be channelled through programmes dealing with health, water and sanitation, education, child and women protection and participation, improving household economic security and building relationships.

Suchada Khreusirikul, operation support manager of Plan Thailand, said Thailand's share of the grant would be 150-170 million baht annually over the next five years.

Plan-initiated projects had already taken shape in seven provinces in the North and Northeast _ Udon Thani, Khon Kaen, Nong Bua Lam Phu, Si Sa Ket, Maha Sarakham, Chiang Mai, and Chiang Rai.

To truly combat poverty, the international community needed to reduce the subsidies given to US, European, and Japanese farmers, the report said.

Richer countries could make a difference by paying more for the goods they buy from developing countries.

Plan said Asian governments could also do more to combat poverty by decentralising more of their public spending to the local level.