Mrs. Mubarak inaugurates African child forum
Egypt's First Lady Suzanne Mubarak will inaugurate on Monday the African Child Forum to be attended by a number of African President's spouses and is organised by the National Council Of Childhood and Motherhood in cooperation with Organisation of African Unity and UNICEF.
Meanwhile, Chairman of NCFCM ambassador Moshira Khattab said that the conference will probe African child issues and setting up proper solutions.
A four-day Pan-African Forum on the Future of Children, to start on Monday, represents a call to salvage the children of Africa.
The forum was called for by Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak. Mubarak's ratification of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child early in the month.
The charter was adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa in July 1990 and was passed by the People's Assembly recently.
The meetings are organised by the OAU and the UNICEF and comes before the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) meetings in September 2001 in a bid to assess progress made since the First World Summit on Children in 1990 and see for the challenges facing children in the next decade.
The African children are suffering a lot of dire conditions including enforced military service in areas of disputes, infection with AIDS which is rampant in Africa where two thirds of the world's 50 million HIV-carriers live, drug addiction, and slavery.
According to the UNICEF reports, about 300,000 children, including girls, under the age of 18 work as soldiers in armed conflicts worldwide, 120,000 of whom fight in African alone, especially in Angola, the Democratic Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda.
Girl soldiers in Angola, subject to abuse.
Also, most African children, in areas of dispute, become refugees. According to UNRWA reports, more than 65 percent of 300,000 refugees are children who have no hope of returning to their homes in the near future.
Africa also suffers from a wave of slavery. About 27 million, says international reports, live at present under the heat of different kinds of slavery.
The number is even growing because of the raging civil wars and famines. Prompting some people to sell and abduct children.
Statistics show that children slaves have become a phenomenon in Latin America, Asia, and West Africa where about 200,000 children are forced to work in farms in the mornings and are locked and tortured like animals at nights.
The Ivory Coast is a hotbed for such trade where some families do not resist the temptation to buy their children for $ 15 a child.
Poor life conditions also push children in Africa to work before they turn 18. In developing nations, 250 million children ranging from 5 to 14 years old engage in jobs, 32 percent of whom are Africans.
The African children become orphans because the HIV/AIDS epidemic which kills their parent. Every day 5,000 Africans die because of AIDS, a figure which is expected to reach 13,000 a day by 2005.
The UN estimates the number of children orphans because of the spread of AIDS at 11.2 million children worldwide, 95 percent of whom are in Africa.
The Cairo forum seeks to develop an African position to submit to the UNGASS by urging OAU member states to ratify the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.