Ethiopia: A country of orphans

[Jabhad]

Ethiopia: orphans on the brink of war

As the EU announces a €60 million food security grant to impoverished Ethiopia, the UN warns that in nearly four years, half the country’s children will be orphans.

 

By Theodore Liasi for ISN Security Watch (30/10/05)

 

 

Ethiopia is reported to have one of the world’s largest populations of orphans and vulnerable children in a nation on the brink of war.

 

Bedeviled with famine and HIV/AIDS, Ethiopia is currently locked in a war of words with neighboring Eritrea. Both sides are engaged in a game of brinkmanship, with the UN caught in the middle of a 25-kilometer-wide demilitarized buffer zone.

 

According to some reports, the standard of living of Ethiopians lags hundreds years behind that of the average European. Education, healthcare, and even the most primitive farming strategies are virtually unknown.

In and among the turmoil and primitive conditions, Ethiopia’s children are on the frontline, bearing the brunt of the crisis that has gripped the country.

 

Extreme poverty continues to plague the land, with an average annual per capita income at less than US$100 and life expectancy just 46 years of age.

 

One out of ten children die before reaching their first birthday, and one out of six die before the age of five.

 

Only 11 per cent of the population in urban Ethiopia have access to clean drinking water, leaving nine out of ten children to drink unsafe surface water.

 

In a bid to try and relieve the deepening crisis, the EU announced last Wednesday that it would provide a €60 million (US$73 million) grant to Ethiopia for a food security program over the next five years. The grant is intended to benefit farmers in 262 districts of the country, according to an agreement signed in Addis Ababa on Wednesday.

 

The deal was signed between Finance and Economic Development Minister Sofian Ahmed and European Commission Ambassador Tim Clarke.

 

It is the first substantial foreign aid Ethiopia has managed to secure since the bitterly disputed 15 May general elections, which saw the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) of incumbent Prime Minister Meles Zenawi sworn into office amid claims of vote-rigging and concerns over the killing of demonstrators during clashes with security forces.

 

British Prime Minister Tony Blair conveyed his government’s dissatisfaction over the incident by withholding some US$35 million in development aid earmarked for Ethiopia in 2005.

 

A country of orphans

Africa has the greatest number of orphaned children in the world, with 34 million living in the sub-Saharan region alone.

 

Within four years, nearly half of Ethiopia’s children will be orphans.

 

Dr. Bulti Gutema, representing the Labor and Social Ministry, told a government and UN initiative last Tuesday that there were currently 4.6 million orphans in Ethiopia - 11 per cent of the country’s child population - and that 12 per cent of them are believed to have HIV/AIDS.

 

The situation is deteriorating and experts predict that by 2010, 43 per cent of the country’s children could be orphans.

 

With over half of the population reported to be under the age of 18, this represent a serious problem for the government and aid agencies.

 

According to UN officials, 18 per cent of households are taking care of orphans, while 6.1 per cent of AIDS orphans are forced to beg in order to survive.

 

Food insecurity, shortage of resources, stigma and discrimination, and a lack of psychosocial care, among other things, remain the biggest problems of orphans and vulnerable children in Ethiopia.

 

Bulti also indicated that the government and other UN agencies were undertaking various efforts to tackle the growing problem.

 

The new campaign “offers a chance for every one of us who care about the future of our children to make a contribution to ensure that orphans and other vulnerable children get the support, the love, the protection, and the resources they need to fulfill their dream just like every other Ethiopian child,” said Bjorn Ljungqvist, UNICEF Representative to Ethiopia.

 

Compounding matters, the UN has also reported that child trafficking still continues unabated despite measures to combat the exploitation of children.

 

According to a recent UNICEF report, child labor and child prostitution continue to be major problems, as the level of poverty in Ethiopia is so absolute that many families simply cannot support their own children or take on relatives’ children whose parents have died from HIV/AIDS or other illnesses.

 

There is no system for collecting data about educational access, trafficking, or the levels of child labor.

 

“Most of the information we have from the IOM [international Organization for Migration] is of young girls being trafficked to the Middle East,” UNICEF spokesman Indrias Getacheu in Addis Ababa told ISN Security Watch on Thursday.

 

“Young girls think that they will make a lot of money and are promised a good job. But when they get there they find that they don’t have any protection, they don’t have any legal status and they end up in a situation of bondage,”

 

“If they get caught, they are arrested, end up in prison, and face all kinds of abuse. A lot of times they come back mentally disturbed, sick, and a lot of times in caskets.”

 

Internally, Ethiopian children are sold for as little as US$1.20 to work as domestic workers or prostitutes.

 

According to the IOM, up to 20,000 children are sold each year by their parents and trafficked by brokers to work in cities across the country.

 

The IOM estimates that 12,000 to 14,000 Ethiopian women are working in Lebanon, mostly in domestic service.

 

The figures were announced as the Ethiopian government, the UN, and the IOM launched a campaign to highlight the suffering endured by vulnerable children.

 

“While this crisis of vulnerable children is depriving children of their rights to human development, it is also proving to be a growing burden on already impoverished communities,” said UNICEF’s Bjorn Ljungqvist.

 

Alem Brook, a legal expert with the IOM’s counter-trafficking unit in Addis Ababa, said the level of internal trafficking of children in Ethiopia was one of the highest in the world.

 

“The parents are often deceived with promises of money or that the child will be educated,” Alem told journalists last week. “Traffickers pay around 10 to 20 Ethiopian birr [uS$1.20 to US$2.40] for each child. We are talking about thousands of children each year.”

 

According to the IOM, trafficking is the fastest growing crime in the world; it is believed to net those involved around US$10 billion a year.

 

Alem said the majority of boys and girls ended up as domestic laborers, commercial sex workers, weavers, or professional beggars.

 

Traffickers in Ethiopia expect to earn around 7,000 birr (around US$800) for each victim they send overseas, she added. If caught, they are liable to 20 years' imprisonment, but few are ever prosecuted.

 

According to the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor, the exploitation of children in Ethiopia is particularly difficult to research “due to their hidden, sometimes illegal or even criminal nature".

 

“Slavery, debt bondage, trafficking, sexual exploitation, the use of children in the drug trade and in armed conflict, as well as hazardous work are all defined as Worst Forms of Child Labor,” the group said.

 

The UN special representative of the secretary-general for children and armed conflict announced new measures in a report to eradicate the exploitation of children.

 

The campaign for the “era of application” calls on all UN member states, including Ethiopia, to establish a monitoring and reporting program offering effective protection and relief to children within their territories.

 

UNICEF estimates that looking after each orphaned child in Ethiopia would cost around US$300 a year, totaling some US$1.38 billion, yet the organization has less than US$10 million available. Some 300,000 children already live on the streets, according to the UN body.