UNICEF’s 2010 State of the World’s Children Report, Celebrating 20 Years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

"Like my other four choices, it is an action-orientated document with an international perspective. It is not just theory or principles but summarises the specifics of progress with some of the challenges which remain. It is also a document linked directly to the United Nations, which, of course, set the MDGs at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. Yes, important and sometimes dramatic progress, as the document brings out. There has been progress directly in implementing the rights of the child, progress in terms of monitoring the rights of the child, progress in terms of the committee which oversees the rights of the child and, at the most specific level, progress in terms of child health and nutrition, access to water and sanitation, and an increase in the number of children in education, particularly girls in schools. In all these areas there has been progress worldwide. So that is the good news. The report does, however, bring out that this progress has been very uneven. Advance has been most rapid, often ahead of the Millennium Development Goals, in China and in other parts of Asia. Because of China’s quantitative importance in the world this gives an over-optimistic sense of the general progress in the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In Sub-Saharan Africa, there has been much less progress. There is a very mixed picture in Latin America. It is also interesting that in the Middle East, where countries are often oil-rich, there hasn’t been that much economic progress over the last 20 years. However, what I like about the UNICEF report is that it makes clear that, even in countries that are not doing so well economically, it is still possible to make important progress for children. That is what we have seen in the single most important indicator of child welfare – child mortality, the number of children under-five dying each year. This has gone down from about 15 million a year in 1980 to 12 million in 1990 and to just under nine million today. This was made possible by a series of specific actions focused on children – immunisation to tackle child health, expansion of access to water and sanitation actions and, supremely, mobilisation through the media and education to make mothers more aware of the importance of hygiene and how to tackle common diseases such as diarrhoea, and the importance of taking children for immunisation."