From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Dec 14 2009 - 14:41:28 EST
Africa's population boom traps children in poverty
McClatchy Newspapers Shashank Bengali, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Sun Dec 13,
12:01 pm ET
KANO, Nigeria — The boy stepped into the grubby street, looking both ways
for traffic. He was wearing the clothes he wore yesterday and seemingly all
the days before: a pair of too-big cotton pants and a black shirt so
tattered that it seemed ready to fall off his body. His bony shoulders
peeked through the holes where the sleeves once were stitched.
At an intersection, the 10-year-old beggar weaved between idling cars, his
feet clapping the asphalt in mismatched flip-flops, one yellow, one red. He
held out a plastic bowl and tried to lock eyes with the people behind the
smudged car windows, hoping for a flash of sympathy, a rolled-down window,
an outstretched arm proffering a crumpled bill.
Until a year ago, Ghaddafi Auwalu lived with his family on their small plot
outside this fast-growing city in northern Nigeria . His parents sent him
away, Ghaddafi said, for reasons that might be difficult for faraway people
to understand: They had too many children, and they couldn't afford to look
after him.
"I'm less of a burden to my mom if I am here," said the polite boy, the 11th
child in a family of 12, not unusually large for this part of West Africa .
"Now she'll have more time for my sisters and brothers."
Although it's frequently portrayed as a continent decimated by epidemics,
starvation and war, Africa is gripped by one of the greatest population
explosions ever recorded. Over the past 60 years, while birth rates in the
rest of the developing world declined by half, Africa's population
quadrupled to 1 billion, an epic baby boom that threatens to trap a
generation of children in poverty and strangle economic progress across the
world's neediest continent.
Driven largely by low rates of contraception use and social pressures to
have big families, sub-Saharan African women bear 5.3 children each on
average, compared with 2.1 in the United States . The continent is producing
a child every second, and by 2050 its population will reach 2 billion,
projects the Population Reference Bureau , a demographic research center in
Washington .
Nearly half of Africa's people are 15 or younger, a youth bulge that will
struggle to find jobs and support its own children, and perhaps condemn the
continent to more disillusionment and violence.
In the sprawling slums of tin and mud that snake through Nairobi , the
booming capital of Kenya , families of six, eight, even 10 or more children
survive on one simple meal a day as jobless parents struggle to keep up with
creeping food prices. Many days, they don't eat at all.
In war-torn Somalia and Congo , which are among the fastest-growing
countries in the world, millions of children are being raised in refugee
camps or makeshift shelters fashioned from cloth and sticks. Schools are
poor or nonexistent, and chores as simple as fetching firewood can be death
sentences.
In Mozambique , a nation at peace but blighted by poverty, teenage girls are
pressed into marriage, a practice that eases the burden on their large
families but cuts short their education and shoves them into motherhood
before they're ready.
In parts of West Africa , overwhelmed parents are sending young boys such as
Ghaddafi to fend for themselves in hostile cities. Under the guise of an
Islamic education, teachers are forcing these boys to beg for their
survival, a modern-day Oliver Twist story played out by the tens of
thousands in the bustling streets and sinister back alleys of places such as
Kano.
"It's a sign of the disintegration of the social fabric and the huge
pressure on families," said John F. May , the World Bank's lead population
researcher for Africa .
"People are making choices they don't want to make. It will lead to a lot of
nasty things."
No one knows what the future holds for all these new Africans.
On a continent in which most people still grow the food they eat, will
population growth create impossible demands on agriculture and ravage the
environment as families try to extract ever more from the land?
Or will nations adapt, build schools, health systems and economies to match
their growing numbers, and avert disaster?
What's clear is that "this is the area of the world that, it's fair to say,
can least afford . . . a population explosion," said Carl Haub , a senior
demographer at the Population Reference Bureau .
'I MISS MY PARENTS'
By 2050, Nigeria is expected to vault past Bangladesh and Brazil to become
the world's sixth-most-populous nation.
In dust-choked Kano, the largest city in the predominantly Muslim north,
children are everywhere. In the afternoons, following the midday Islamic
prayer, they surge in the hundreds from dun-colored mosques and collect like
droplets in dirt parking lots, the only adults around those who emerge from
offices and storefronts to shoo them away.
The average woman here has seven children, according to national statistics.
Among the Hausa, the main ethnic group, a cold-eyed reckoning of the burden
that too many offspring can create hasn't overpowered the traditional belief
that children represent wealth — and a safety net for parents in old age.
"If you're poor, the idea of having a small family doesn't even arise," said
Adamu Kiyawa, who runs a nonprofit group for street kids.
Late one sticky afternoon, with the sun finally releasing its grip on the
sky, scores of children gathered in the concrete yard of a local
businessman's charity, many of them clutching begging bowls of brightly
colored plastic. They came for handouts of rice and a thick millet porridge
from a local charity. For most of them, it was the only meal of the day.
The boys jostled for position, and amid the squealing ruckus stood Ghaddafi,
wordlessly listing forward and back with the crowd. His arms were glazed
with dust, his eyes fixed on the men in prayer caps doling out rice in
palm-sized plastic bags.
In three hours of begging that day, he collected 30 naira , about 20 cents .
He kept one hand in his pocket, cupped around the coins.
"I miss my parents," he said.
Ghaddafi grew up a few miles away, down the pocked ribbon of asphalt that
leads north out of Kano, on a plot of mud-walled huts half-shaded by a large
acacia tree.
His father, who repairs motorcycle tires by the roadside, had three wives.
Ghaddafi spent his days sweeping the huts, and his nights on the hard earth
alongside his siblings, curled up on a thin sheet that got damp when it
rained.
There was no money to send the children to school. The women tended to a
meager farm, planting beans, groundnuts and millet and praying for rains
that had become increasingly erratic.
Some weeks, Ghaddafi recalled, they had only a cup of weak tea in the
mornings and a handful of bland, gummy porridge before bed.
One day about a year ago, Ghaddafi's father introduced him to a
gentle-looking man in his 70s with wispy gray hairs on his chin. Husseini
Adamu was the teacher at an Islamic school in Kano, and he'd come to take
some village boys as students.
"How would you like to join them?" Ghaddafi's father asked.
"I never went to school before," the boy recalled. "I wanted to be with my
friends."
BEGGING FOR AN EDUCATION
For centuries in West Africa , boys as young as 7 have been sent away to
school. The young pupils are known as "almajiri," from an Arabic word that
means seeker of Islamic knowledge.
Critics say the teachers are little more than agents of destitution.
Customarily unpaid, they live off their students, fanning boys out to beg
for alms or work as servants in middle-class homes. In Kano, tens of
thousands of children, wearing grimy clothes and hungry faces, huddle at
street corners and clog intersections, begging for their educations.
Kano government officials said there was little they could do to curb the
practice, which was rooted in local traditions and supported by parents such
as Ghaddafi's.
"When children go begging, they learn discipline," said Ghaddafi's father,
Auwalu Mohammed, a slight man with watery eyes and palms coated with tire
grease.
"When you allow a child to fend for himself at that age, he learns to be on
his own. He won't be a daddy's boy or stuck to his mother's apron. He won't
be lazy, or self-indulgent, or wayward."
Certainly not lazy.
Ghaddafi's days start before dawn, when he wriggles awake amid dozens of
boys sleeping shoulder to shoulder under a tin roof outside Adamu's
dilapidated brick schoolhouse. After the morning prayer, the boys sit for a
few hours of lessons. There's no math, science or composition, just Adamu,
the stooped old teacher, reading aloud long passages from the Quran with the
boys' unruly recitations echoing through the dirt alleyways.
"I am not a wealthy man," Adamu said. "I have 250 students, and the parents
don't give me anything. I'm just doing the work of God."
At midmorning, the boys head into the streets.
Ghaddafi worked alone, kicking the dirt listlessly when an hour passed with
no money, then lighting up when a middle-aged driver in dark sunglasses
dropped a few coins into his bowl.
Ghaddafi gave the coins to Adamu's wife. In a few months he'll ask for bus
fare back to his village, where he'll stand outside his father's hut and
show him what he's learned.
"He's an intelligent boy," the father said, suddenly filled with pride. "He
comes home and recites from the Quran perfectly. When I look at how he's
doing, I'm impressed."
'DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND' MISSED?
Many experts fear that Africa's endemic corruption and mismanagement will
prevent it from realizing what's called the "demographic dividend," the
economic surge that Asian countries, for example, enjoyed in the late 20th
century when more of their people came of working age.
Graft and political violence batter Nigeria , the United States'
fifth-largest oil supplier. Nuhu Ribadu , a respected former anti-corruption
czar, estimates that from 1960 to 1999, Nigerian officials stole or wasted
$440 billion in public money.
Today the government spends just 3 percent of its oil-drenched budget on
education and 1 percent on health, among the lowest rates in the world,
according to United Nations statistics.
In Kano, some public school classrooms accommodate more than 150 students,
four times as many as they did 30 years ago, said Yusuf Adamu , a
demographics expert at Bayero University in Kano who's no relation to
Ghaddafi's teacher.
"It's simply because we don't plan," he said. "We have a huge increase in
people who could be economically productive, but because the state doesn't
provide adequate health care and education, the only likely outcome is more
poverty."
Indeed, if you were Ghaddafi, what's the best you could hope for?
The most successful almajiri graduates, Ghaddafi said, save enough money to
open street-corner kiosks at which they hawk cheap goods such as soap,
chewing gum and telephone calling cards. Other young boys sometimes get work
cleaning houses or washing cars.
Lately he's been weighing whether to take a job as a houseboy for a
middle-class family in Kano. It would mean missing lessons, and perhaps
dropping out of school, but he could get off the streets for a while.
"Anyway," he reasoned, "the teacher has too many students. He would never
come looking for me."
TO HELP AFRICAN WOMEN, CHILDREN
Several international relief organizations promote maternal and child health
in Africa . Listed below are some of these organizations:
— In Nigeria , Save the Children UK promotes health care for pregnant women
and children and efforts to keep children in school.
— In Uganda , Family Health International promotes community-based family
planning services and conducts research on preventing the transmission of
HIV.
— In Uganda , Reproductive Health Uganda, an affiliate of the International
Planned Parenthood Federation , provides family planning services and
diagnosis and treatment of sexually transmitted infections.
— In Mozambique , World Vision, a Christian charity, runs a child
sponsorship program through which donors in the United States help more than
28,000 boys and girls get access to food, health care and education.
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----