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'A World Fit For Children' - follow-up commitments

Special Session on Children | Child poverty | Children's rights | Mobilising resources | Globalisation and policy coherence

If the goals of the Plan of Action are to be achieved, new, substantial and long-term resource commitments - human, financial and material - are required. It is estimated that a minimum of $70 billion per annum is required to reach the goals in health and education alone. These resources need to come from both domestic and international sources.

Child poverty

One of the most significant gaps in the Plan of Action is the absence of a concerted, practical and time-bound set of actions to eradicate child poverty. In total,600 million children live in extreme poverty - the largest number in history. Poverty is a major obstacle to the ability of parents to protect their children's rights to survival and development and to provide them with the educational and other opportunities that every parent desires for their child.

Children's rights

The near universal ratification of the UNCRC was a major success of the 1990s. It established once and for all that children do have human rights and that governments have duties to respect and fulfil them. These rights are concerned with the most important practical aspects of children's lives that governments can reasonably be expected to do something about. It also establishes that these essential rights belong to all children - including the disabled, indigenous children, refugees and other discriminated-against groups. Of course there are other very important things that children need - love, respect, moral guidance, good and responsible parenting, but these cannot be legislated for, or made an enforceable duty. However,what governments can do is to create an environment in which parents and other carers are given support and assistance to enable them to offer these to their children.

The issue of child rights was one of the most contentious aspects of the negotiations leading up to the Special Session - despite the fact that the majority of governments gave strong support to the UNCRC. The Child Rights Caucus of NGOs has argued throughout the Special Session process that the best way to construct a world fit for children is to use the principles and standards of the UNCRC. Politically and practically it makes sense to build on the foundations created over the last ten years in implementing the UNCRC. It does not make sense to have two competing sets of obligations on governments (as happened in the 1990s).

The Child Rights Caucus therefore argued that the Plan of Action should clearly express this through:

specific reference to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as the key framework for the Declaration and Plan of Action
a clear statement that the purpose of the Declaration and Plan of Action is to advance and ensure implementation of the UNCRC
integrating monitoring of progress of the Plan of Action with the monitoring systems of the UNCRC

The negotiations, however, have left the links between the Plan of Action and the UNCRC incomplete and uncertain. On the positive side, the Declaration reaffirms the obligations of governments to promote and protect the rights of children. However, there has not been full recognition of the UNCRC as the central statement of children's rights.

Failure to use the UNCRC as the basis for implementing the Plan of Action will not just be a setback to the cause of children's rights but also to efforts to create a better world for children. It will perpetuate, rather than remove, the current fragmentation of responsibility for children and will encourage a focus on a limited set of goals, separated from the overall vision for children that the UNCRC contains.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

In May 2000,the General Assembly adopted two Optional Protocols to the UNCRC: one on the involvement of children in armed conflicts and another on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Both of these entered into force in 2002 (a/res/54/263 and a/res/54/263).

Mobilising resources

The Plan of Action repeats familiar calls for higher levels of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), enhanced debt relief, implementation of the 20/20 Initiative and the development of 'innovative' (but unspecified) arrangements for mobilising additional resources, both private and public. It encourages governments to 'explore' re-allocating military expenditure to children - at a time when agreements on arms sales made by developing countries totalled $25.4 billion in 2000, the highest in constant dollars since 1994.

Levels of ODA fell during the 1990s, are far too unstable and are not targeted on supporting achievement of the goals - while debt relief is slow, insufficient and too few countries are eligible to receive it. The majority of the least-developed countries spend far more on debt servicing than they do on basic services for children - and they will continue to do so even after debt relief under the enhanced heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative.

The unwillingness of governments to allocate resources on a scale proportionate to the problems faced by children is clear. Current investment in basic services, which is a good measure of both domestic and international commitment to children, is only two-thirds of that required to achieve the child-focused Millennium Development Goals. These targets include universal primary education in all countries by 2015; the elimination of gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005; reduction in under-5 mortality by two-thirds of the 1990 level by 2015; reduction of maternal mortality by three-quarters of the 1990 level by 2015; access through the primary health care system to reproductive health services by 2015.

The call for higher levels of ODA is linked to a 30-year-old commitment by the developed countries to give 0.7% of their GNP in aid, a commitment which has never been honoured. If it were honoured this alone would generate $100 billion. But ODA is currently given at only a third of the level promised - and only a tenth of that is targeted at basic services for children. Recent efforts to set up a Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis - among the most serious diseases facing children - have demonstrated the scale of the problem. Only $1.8 billion has been committed to the Fund (as of July 2001) - this is too small an amount to have real impact.

Yet there is some good news on this front. From 18-22 March 2002 an international conference "Financing for Development" was held in Monterrey,Mexico. This was the first UN-hosted conference on key financial and development issues. Over 50 heads of states and over 200 ministers attended the conference. This meeting was significant because it marked the first exchange of views between governments, civil society, the business community and the institutional stakeholders on global economic issues.

There were a number of significant outcomes to the meetings, notably the EU and the United States both committing to increase their ODA budgets. This is significant, as the EU represents more than 50% of all ODA worldwide, including humanitarian aid, totalling $25.4 billion in 2000. Similarly the United States made a commitment to increasing its development budget by $5 billion over the next three budget years. The conference was also significant because it recognised the link between financing of development and attaining internationally agreed development goals and objectives, including those
contained in the Millennium Declaration.

Aid and new international resources, however, are not the only solution. Developing countries themselves already spend 27 times more on basic services for children than rich country donors provide. What is also required is greater attention to the effectiveness of that spending (including addressing corruption and the diversion of resources to better-off groups). In education expenditure, for example, there needs to be a stronger emphasis on concentrating spending on primary and secondary education, both to increase the enrolment of children from poor families and to improving its quality. Decentralisation can also play a part in improving the effectiveness of public expenditure - provided it is accompanied by the decentralisation of management, and greater participation by communities, parents and children.

Globalisation and policy coherence

Global trade, agricultural and investment policies can play an important part in determining the resources available to developing countries to help them reach the goals and targets of the Plan of Action. Such policies play a key role in determining whether children benefit from globalisation. At present, however, there is a lack of coherence between such policies and the goals of the Plan of Action.

It is estimated, for example, that nearly $50 billion a year - 70 percent of the $70 billion a year needed to give every child in the world access to basic education, primary heath care and safe water - is lost to the developing world because of protectionism and barriers to market access in the industrialised world. (This includes tariff and non-tariff barriers and agricultural subsidies). The goals of the Plan of Action are much more likely to be achieved if policy in these other areas can be aligned in support of them, rather than undermining them. The promotion of children's rights and the achievement of the goals of the Plan of Action should be a central element of trade and other global negotiations.