Monday, May 20, 2019

Saving the Children

Every year in just ten conflict-affected countries at least 100,000 infants die who in the absence of conflict would survive, says a new report British charity Save the Children.

The study applied the findings in The Lancet’s study to the ten worst conflict-affected countries, which estimates that in the last five years alone more than 550,000 infants have died due to the reverberating impact of conflict. The total for children under five is 870,000.
The estimates suggest that every year in just ten conflict-affected countries at least 100,000 infants die who in the absence of conflict would survive.

The new report said: 420 million children are living in conflict zones, nearly one in five of the global population – is a rise of nearly 30 million children from 2016.
The ten countries hit the hardest are Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Syria, Iraq, Mali, Nigeria and Somalia. The number of children living in conflict zones has doubled since the end of the Cold War. 142 million children are living in high-intensity conflict-zones; that is, in conflict zones with more than 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year.

The Save the Children report bared a few hard facts:
“Increasingly, the brunt of armed violence and warfare is being borne by children. Children suffer in conflict in different ways to adults, partly because they are physically weaker and also because they have so much at stake – their physical, mental and psychosocial development are heavily dependent on the conditions they experience as children..."


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