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 Together with the other UN member-nations, Brazil committed itself to fulfill eight Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015. It thus pledged to eliminate very grave disparities perpetuating poverty, injustice and iniquity and to assure the benefits of development to all Brazilians.
But concern with children is a fundamental condition for meeting these goals. The world will continue unjust and unequal as long as more than a billion children are facing extreme poverty, lack of educational and developmental opportunities, exposure to child labor and sexual exploitation, lack of basic rights like healthcare, food, and a residence with clean water and indoor plumbing. The State of the World's Children 2006 report, released by UNICEF on December 14, points out an unacceptable situation. Entitled "Excluded and Invisible," it denounces the fact that millions of the world's children do not benefit from the social policies or the advances of progress. They are children hidden under the mantle of misery, exclusion and discrimination, children denied the most basic rights, including the right to a birth certificate, to the state of citizenship. Those nameless children with no childhood or future do not even appear in the official statistics and are given no space in the official programs, those that should be designed precisely to meet their needs. They become invisible in the eyes of the government officials; they continue excluded from access to essential goods and services; they live ignored by society, forgotten by the communication media. Serving as one example of forgetfulness and invisibility in Brazil is the evolution of the mortality rate for children less than five years of age, deaths that are in the majority avoidable. In the last three years, the rate fell from 36 per thousand (2003) to 34 per thousand (2005). But in comparison with the rest of the world, our situation worsened. Analyzing the classification of the 195 countries included in this index, which has Sierra Leone in first - or worst - place, we see that Brazil lost five positions. It occupied the 93rd worst place in 2003, rising to 90th in 2004 and 88th in 2005. In three years, it was surpassed by China, Egypt, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Peru. In those three years, we denied 1.5 million Brazilians the right to life. These children had no name and never knew a dignified dwelling; they never crossed the threshold of a school or had the opportunity to live with books, blackboards, classmates, teachers. They did not enter into the statistics of children between the ages of 7 and 14 without access to education. They did not help Brazil to grow. They died. As in other sectors - education, for example - our country is improving at a slower pace than that of the others. What is curious is that Brazil has already shown that it can mobilize around statistics. In 1999, due to a change in methodology, we fell from 67th to 79th position in the Human Development Index (HDI). Academicians, governmental authorities and the communication media all united in their criticism of the report results. But the scandalous death of children has not merited the same attention. Our public policies continue to ignore millions of children, depriving them of the chance for a dignified future. Perhaps this is because no one unequivocally relates childhood and progress. Perhaps we do not perceive that compromising the development of children is compromising our development. The invisible children do not appear to provoke any visible shame. Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PDT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br. Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome – LinJerome@cs.com.
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If one billion children are not taken care of in the world, Brazil being a big country AND badly ranked, their share cannot be "only"
1.5 million.
That would represent 0.15 % of the world suffering children.
JUST IMPOSSIBLE NUMBERS !