Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on the
planet and conditions there for children are harsh. Half of all
children under the age of five will die of diarrhoea, those who
do survive will suffer from frequent bouts of illness even at
school, where only 18% of Madagascar's schools have access to
drinking water and only 30% have toilets.
36.8% of children under the age of 5yrs in Madagascar are underweight and 51
children out of every 1000 die at birth (compared to 4.56 in the UK.) Most
children who live in Madagascar help their families raise rice
and herd cattle, mainly ox-like mammals, and they measure their
wealth by how many cattle they have.
This has hit children hard
with many of the island's 910,000 orphans (nearly 10% of its entire child population)
making their way onto the streets of cities such as Antananarivo in search of survival. Even those with
families have now been forced
to abandon school
to work to find work. As one youngster put
it "What’s the point of doing nothing in school all day when
there’s nothing to eat at the end of it?" There are also
reports of parents abandoning their children when they can no
longer support them, including infant children just left by themselves
on the streets.
Similarly
there are reports of mothers abandoning
their new born babies in hospital because they can't afford to
feed them nor afford any future medical care with, for example,
treatment of childhood tuberculosis costing more than a month's
factory wage. As noted above, exact figures are not known, but the number
of street children in Madagascar
certainly runs into thousands with some of these children even
being born on the streets. Its a testament to the size of the
problem that the international charity Medicine Sans Frontieres
recently left the capital city of Antananarivo saying that the
problem is simply too large for them and responsibility must lie
with the Madagascan government.
Of the 9,571,000
children in Madagascar, there are 910,000 orphans, just under
10%,and 11,000 of these have been orphaned by AIDS (although
some sources put this higher at 30,000) with five children being
born every day in Madagascar with the virus. Overall 43% of the
country's population is under the age of 15yrs old (compared
with 17% for the UK) and many grow up without adult care having
to fend for themselves or being brought up in child-headed
families. As
discussed elsewhere, many children in Madagascar do not attend
school, and for those who do there are high drop out rates with
only 60% completing primary education (6 - 11 yrs).
These figures are somewhat distorted by the fact
that around one third of all
children
in Madagascar had no access to primary education in the first
place and those who do often find their already run down schools
badly damaged by the storms that hit the island every year
making them unusable for long periods, or closed due to a lack
of teaching staff.
The reality is that many Madagascar children are dependent on
outside aid to have any viable future however, apart from the
work of some NGOs operating in the country, that aid has mainly
been suspended. The video,
below, explores the situation of
children in Madagascar where many are now suffering from
malnutrition not least because of erratic rainfall patterns and
the suspension of aid from the EU and other places following the
political crisis of 2009. It shows how organisations such as
UNICEF are reaching out to children and families in Madagascar
to assist. The current crisis had led
to an increase in the numbers of street children
in places like the Madagascan capital of Antananarivo, already home to thousands
of children begging on the streets. One eleven year old even
described the lifestyle as even being lucky: "Sometimes the street vendors let
us sleep by their fires. The grannies who sleep on the pavements know us; they
know we have our own money and we won't steal from them, so they let us stay."
Details of how to sponsor a child in Madagascar with Madagascar
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Facts and figures about street children in Madagascar; a growing problem that is overwhelming charities.
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Information about the growing crisis of street children in Africa escaping poverty and violence.
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