State of our children

A staggering one-third of all children under 5 in Pakistan are underweight — pointing to widespread food insecurity.

The State of the World’s Children report for 2014 makes for some very worrying reading. Thus, Pakistan is ranked twenty-sixth in the list of countries with the highest infant mortality rate in the world. There has been improvement since 1990 when the under-five mortality rate was 13.8 per cent, but 86 babies out of every thousand died under five in Pakistan in 2012. The picture for those dying under a year old is 69 per thousand in 2012, and the average life expectancy assuming children live beyond five is 66 years. A staggering one-third of all children under five in Pakistan are underweight — which points to widespread food insecurity and will result in stunting and impaired mental capacity.

The litany of bad news is long. There are 817,000 people who are HIV positive. The demographic is skewed towards youth with 41.2 per cent of the population under 18 years. Their prospects in a country that under-invests in education are bleak. Seven per cent marry young — at 15 or younger and 24 per cent are married by the time they are 18, further bloating the youth bulge as they in their turn produce children. Ten per cent of women aged between 20 and 24 had their first child before they were 18. Contraceptive prevalence is low among women, with 27 per cent using some form of contraception. Development is hampered everywhere by poor literacy rates, with the consolidated rate put at 55 per cent, but in rural areas and Balochistan and inner Sindh, literacy rates are below two per cent for women.

On the plus side, 91 per cent have access to potable water, 72 per cent of the urban population had access to sanitation but only 34 per cent of rural population did, giving a national average of 47 per cent. Twenty-one per cent of Pakistanis live in abject poverty, subsisting on $1.25 a day or less. All these figures indicate chronic debilitating malaise and a radical rethink of developmental priorities is needed to mitigate the decline.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2014.

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