"Poverty takes toll on children"

Poverty takes toll on children
By Raymond Thibodeaux
COX NEWS SERVICE
Published January 19, 2006

DEBARK, Ethiopia
For Biset Chanie, a graying father of four, no humiliation is worse
than feeling compelled by poverty to scatter children he no longer can
afford to feed and clothe.
Mr. Chanie pulled his two sons from school and hired them out to
farmers in other villages, relying on their occasional and meager
remittances -- sometimes a bag of grain, sometimes a few birr,
Ethiopia's currency.
Now, with little rainfall this growing season, Mr. Chanie fears
having to make an even more difficult decision: Whether to send his
15-year-old daughter to find work as a farmhand or as a servant in
another man's house.
"I don't want to send my children to work for other people, but I
have to. It makes me so sad I feel like crying. But what other choice
is there?" said Mr. Chanie, 50, who has struggled to eke out a living
for his family of five on a tiny, worn-out plot of land on the
outskirts of Debark.
Tiny farms, big families
About 85 percent of the roughly 74 million people in this Horn of
Africa nation subsist on farms no bigger than 1 or 2 acres -- hardly
enough to feed an ordinary Ethiopian family of seven, much less turn a
profit.
Just one dry season is enough for many parents to send some of
their children away in search of jobs, hoping their paltry earnings can
keep the rest of the family afloat.
Across much of Africa, childhoods are cut short by poverty as
children barely in their teens are forced into adult roles, supporting
their families as farm laborers, house servants, street vendors and
even soldiers. At least a third of Africa's children under 14 are
working, with many of them forsaking their education to earn daily
wages, U.N. researchers say.
The scourge of AIDS has ended the childhoods of millions of
children, who are plucked from primary schools and pushed into the
labor force after one or both of their parents die from AIDS-related
illnesses.
Lack of schooling
"There's a need for many of these children to work to help the
family, but it shouldn't be exploitative or keep them from getting an
education, which is often the case," said Alessandro Conticini,
Ethiopia's child-protection director for UNICEF, the United Nations
Children's Fund.
A significant factor contributing to the surge in working children
in Ethiopia, some analysts say, is that fertility rates among its women
outpace the fertility of the soil.
In much of rural Ethiopia, where more than a third of the
population is Orthodox Christian, it is not uncommon for a woman to
bear eight to 10 children in her lifetime, often having her first
children while still in her teens.
Even though Ethiopian families remain big, many farmers say that
prolonged drought, deforestation and soil erosion have led to smaller
and smaller crop yields, making it more difficult for them to feed
their offspring.
"In Ethiopia, children are seen as a kind of wealth. Many families
will have babies even if they are unable to feed them," said Abayneh
Telake, mayor of Gondar in northern Ethiopia, which has a program that
allows hundreds of working children to attend school part time.
No. 1 in orphans
Ethiopia has the world's largest population of orphans. About 4.6
million of its children having lost their parents to AIDS and other
diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, according to a 2004 study by
the United Nations and Ethiopia's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.

Many children, whether orphaned or driven from their families by
poverty, drift toward urban centers in search of work or handouts from
strangers.
More than half a million homeless children roam the streets of
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital.
Many sleep in trash-strewn alleys or abandoned buildings, often
vulnerable to sexual assaults and other forms of exploitation. Children
as young as 4, their noses runny, their clothes dirty and tattered,
weave through the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main boulevards of
Addis Ababa, selling packets of paper napkins for one birr apiece, or
about 12 cents.
But most street children have nothing to sell. They resort to
begging, usually targeting tourists with their tiny, upturned hands and
persistent, heart-wrenching pleas for aid: "Stomach zero, I'm very
hungry," or, as is becoming more often the case, "Mother dead, father
dead, one birr."
Young without hope
The growing number of street children in the capital has become a
security concern for Ethiopian officials, who suspect opposition
parties of recruiting them for violent street protests like those
against last May's disputed elections.
"Someone referred to the unemployed youth here as 'combustible
material.' It's a problem that has to be addressed quickly," Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi said in a recent interview. "Young people without
hope are always a source of instability."
The number of street children is expected to climb in coming years
as more and more youth gravitate to the cities, leaving behind farms
that have been in their families for generations but now are overworked
and overgrazed. They leave behind exhausted fathers who no longer
encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.
"In the days of my grandfather and my father, the land was fertile.
It was never a question that we would not be farmers ourselves," said
Mr. Chanie, his arms folded around his youngest daughter, Destayehu,
10.
"But now the land is tired," he said, "and it's becoming harder to
keep our families together."
Dictatorship a factor
Ethiopia is one of the world's least-developed nations, and nature
and politics are equally to blame. Many parts of the country are prone
to drought, causing cycles of food shortages that sometimes lead to
famines.
But politics has played a role in exacerbating the effects of
droughts and famines.
During the early 1980s, Ethiopia's Soviet-backed ruler, Mengistu
Haile Mariam, ignored warnings of a looming famine in regions of the
country where most of the population opposed his government. Many of
the estimated 1 million Ethiopians who starved to death in the 1984
famine could have been saved had Gen. Mengistu stepped in earlier.
Enmity continues
The two-year war over slivers of land in the country's northern
frontier cost Ethiopia more than $1 million per day, as well as the
support of foreign donors. Development projects stalled, including
plans to build modern irrigation systems and paved roads to help
farmers bring their crops to market.
Recently, the fragile, five-year-old truce between the two
countries has frayed. Political unrest has rocked Ethiopia's capital
since May's disputed elections led to violent street protests and the
arrests of thousands of demonstrators.
Once again, Western donors are pulling back, with a $375 million
aid package put on hold after the imprisonment of more than a hundred
opposition leaders, including the mayor of Addis Ababa.
Government owns land
Opposition parties say that much of Ethiopia's poverty and its
effect on children is exacerbated by the government's ownership of the
land -- a vestige of the Mengistu era. Opposition groups seek
privatization of the land, which would make it easier for farmers to
form cooperatives or acquire enough land to create profitable farms.
Privatizing land in Ethiopia is a bad idea, says Mr. Zenawi, who
argues that most struggling farmers eagerly would sell their farms and
flock to the cities, creating more instability. To ensure a brighter
economic future for the country's children, Mr. Zenawi says Ethiopia
needs more industry, not land reform.

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