Children
and Youth :
A Sacrificed Generation? |
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| During
school hours in the teeming cities of the developing world,
they can be seen, shining shoes, washing cars, pushing trolleys
or collecting refuse. And those are the lucky ones. |
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Without basic education or proper training, street children
are easy prey for drug dealers and pimps. Many slide into a
life of crime or prostitution and often contract HIV/AIDS from
unprotected sex or drug abuse. They get arrested, beaten, even
murdered by “death squads” if they live in the shantytowns of
Rio de Janeiro. |
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| Whether
they are out-of-school girls, orphans or abandoned children,
displaced or refugee children, children with disabilities, child
labourers, or among the estimated 300,000 children under 18
involved in armed conflicts, all children in need have one thing
in common: they are at the bottom of the economic heap. A matter-of-fact
remark by a parent in Udon Thani, Thailand – where the poorest
children are forced into prostitution or begging in the streets
– says it all: “The day we stop being poor is the day we stop
selling our children.” |
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| Poverty
denies schooling, but exclusion from education in turn perpetuates
the cycle of poverty. Education is the best, and often only
means by which a child can break the downward spiral of deprivation.
Anjimile Doka of the United Nations Development Programme believes
that “the inequality between children today is completely unacceptable
and the only way to fight it is to give them a chance for education.”
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"Unless
we take down the walls of gender, poverty, ethnicity, disability
and distance that leave these young millions excluded in the
first place, education for all will remain a bitterly unfulfilled
dream".
Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF.
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Today,
113 million children, most of them girls, are excluded from
education. 100 million of them live in developing nations. An
excluded child might be a boy from a South American hill tribe
recruited into a mili-tia, or a girl who is a sex worker in
an Asian slum. But these, like street children, are at the extreme
end of the scale. In other cases the reasons for exclusion may
be more mundane but the effect is just as pernicious, such as
an African child, usually a girl, kept at home to tend crops,
fetch water or look after younger siblings. |
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A tangled web of socio-cultural, economic and physical factors
excludes children from education. Schools exclude when they
do not welcome families as partners: the education bureaucracy
excludes by failing to adequately support teachers; and governments
exclude by failing to pursue pro-child policies. As governments
have been slow to embrace non-formal education, non-governmental
organizations provide most of the schooling to children in
need. But for real advances to be made, more effective partnerships
between non-governmental organizations and governments must
be built.
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| “Reaching
children on the margins of society is a difficult and costly
task,” remarks Svein Osttveit, Executive Secretary of the Education
for All Forum. “Providing them with learning opportunities is,
and will be, an enormous challenge which needs to be tackled
with imagination.” |
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Partnerships with communities and child-centred learning activities
are at the heart of projects such as ACCESS in Ethiopia, which
have pioneered flexible, community-owned schooling on a large
scale. The alternative basic education programme for children
in Mexico operates in the camps of seasonal migrant workers,
tailoring its schedule to harvest dates and allowing pupils
to rejoin the formal system later. Save the Children are working
with the Lesotho government to integrate children with disabilities
into mainstream schools. |
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Today’s excluded children become tomorrow’s marginalized
youth. Many unreached children enter adolescence unequipped
with the basic skills necessary to fully join society. At over
one billion, there are more young people aged between 15 and
24 in the world than there have ever been – and the numbers
are growing. However, little research exists on marginalized
youth. “Real statistics are lacking, or else being hidden,”
explains Marc Gilmer of UNESCO. “All we see are fragments of
a pattern, with Ministers of Education, Employment, Social Affairs
and Justice each dealing with one particular group of young
people.” |
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Marginalization is not confined to youth in developing
countries: The International Labour Organization (ILO) warns
that youth unemployment and other forms of social exclusion
have reached “intolerably high levels” in the world’s major
industrialized countries. In France, where the young have been
called “la génération salle d’attente”, or the waiting-room
generation, one youth in four is unemployed. |
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Over the past decade, new solutions to fight youth exclusion
have emerged. In the United Kingdom, a project by Voluntary
Services Overseas, a non-governmental organization, involves
marginalized young people in development work. After receiving
training in topics such as HIV awareness, sports development
and global education, they spend six months living and working
in developing countries. The results are more skills, more life
experience and a greater sense of self-worth. |
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Other strategies to fight youth exclusion include community
and night schools, the use of radio in distance education programmes
and helping poor populations develop income-generating skills.
Learning for Life in Mongolia uses radio to teach income-generating
skills to 3,000 geographically isolated young people, among
others. And the European Commission is piloting “second-chance
schools” in twelve countries. |
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In a project run by the Association for the Protection
of the Environment (APE) and UNESCO in the “garbage village”
of Mokattam, in Cairo’s surburbs, thousands of young garbage
collectors have learned to operate plastic-crushing machines,
paper and cardboard compactors and cloth grinders. They acquire
literacy, basic accounting and management skills on the job.
“Market mechanisms produce learning which is just as valid and
effective as education in classrooms,” says Laila Isdandar Kamel,
one of APE’s founders. |
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“It is young people’s hope and energy, their enthusiasm
and willingness to experiment, that make society move forward,”
says Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Conversely,
alienated youth are a recipe for social unrest. Well-targeted
projects can bring them into the mainstream, but, if yet another
generation is not to be sacrified, swift action on a massive
scale is needed. As Mr Annan warns, “A society that cuts itself
off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed
to death.” |
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