Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Over half of Pakistanis will live in cities by 2025: UN

* Urbanisation creates challenges, opportunities for children

* Children in slums face challenges of inadequate access to sanitation, drinking water

ISLAMABAD: By 2025, over half of Pakistan’s population will live in cities - nine cities already have more than a million people. The transition to a largely urban population and the emergence of mega-urban regions is viewed as an engine of growth in the Government’s Framework for Economic Growth.
A new global UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) report highlighted the challenges that faced many children living in cities and towns around the world, and points to examples of good practice that could improve children’s well-being.
The UNICEF report on Tuesday, “State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in the Urban World”, noted that already half of all people, including more than one billion children, lived in urban areas, with the numbers of urban dwellers steadily growing.
Children's situations and needs are often represented by aggregate figures that show urban children to be better off than their rural counterparts, obscuring the disparities that exist among the children of cities, said the UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake, in the report.
"We must do more to reach all children in need, wherever they live, wherever they are excluded and left behind, said Lake.
Pakistan has 37 percent of its population living in urban areas. Equitable access to quality basic social services, including health, nutrition, water, sanitation, education and protection is constrained by multiple levels of deprivation and exclusion. “The challenge is to proactively address the many dimensions of deprivation and exclusion by ensuring equity in the provision of basic social services and social protection,” said UNICEF Pakistan Representative Dan Rohrmann.
“While continuing to serve poor rural children, UNICEF Pakistan also is planning to greatly increase its programming for children in the poorest urban neighbourhoods,” he said. According to UNICEF, one in three city dwellers lives in slums. Especially in slums, where public education options are scarce, families face a choice between paying for their children to attend overcrowded private schools of poor quality or withdrawing their children from school altogether.
Even when schooling is free, ancillary expenses uniforms, classroom supplies or exam fees, for example are often high enough to prevent children from attending school.
Without education, many children go on to work in the streets, with many joining criminal gangs, which offer the promise of financial rewards and a sense of belonging, the report states. It provides a set of recommendations to improve the conditions of children living in cities.
As an example, in 2009, the average number of years of schooling for children was 5.7 years, however, the disparity between the poorest 15 percent of the population and the highest 15 percent was between 2.41 and 8.95 years across different provinces. Girls living in urban areas in the highest income group received an average of 9.39 years of schooling compared with 1.01 years for rural girls in the lowest income group.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds who live in urban areas face a host of challenges that reduce their chance to reach full potential in a productive adult work force. These challenges include low levels of birth registration, inadequate access to sanitation and safe water services, education and health services.
The document stressed that many children in slums also at high risk of contracting diseases due to unsanitary conditions and suffering from malnutrition. The report also emphasised that the children are at high risk of exploitation and trafficking, as well as becoming victims of violence.
Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions facilitate transmission of disease, notably pneumonia and diarrhoea, the two leading killers of children under the age of five worldwide, said the report.
The State of the World’s Children (SOWC) 2012 report includes examples of good practices from around the world spanning service delivery, social protection, and safe and inclusive environments for children in urban areas. It also outlines key steps for an equitable development approach for reaching the poorest children in urban areas.
At the global level, UNICEF and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) have worked together for 15 years on the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, building partnerships with governments and civil society to put children at the centre of the urban agenda and to provide services and create protected areas so children can have the safer and healthier childhoods they deserve. In Pakistan, UN-Habitat and UNICEF have been working together to scale up sanitation for the poorest families. staff report/app

Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk

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