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According to the report, a baby born in Uganda is more likely to be exclusively breastfed up to six months compared to those born anywhere else in East Africa. However, only 42% of Ugandan babies are breastfed within an hour of being born.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative cabinet fairly erupted in indignation this past week as Canada took a knock from a United Nations envoy for turning a blind eye to the poverty, inequality and, yes, the hunger in our midst.

The Children's Commissioner says it is unlikely child poverty will be eradicated in Wales by a 2020 target.

UN aid agencies are under attack from doctors working with refugees who have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, with claims that they are not doing enough to get medical supplies through to children in desperate need.

As G8 leaders meet at Camp David today, Save the Children says that months of warnings have failed to prevent a serious malnutrition crisis sweeping Niger.

UK aid programmes to support education in three east African countries – together worth more than £1bn – are failing to improve children's basic literacy and maths skills, according to a report published on Friday by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI).

At their meeting on 14 May 2012, EU development ministers concluded their discussions on: •EU Pacific Development Partnership •Strengthening resilience to food crisis in the Horn of Africa •Annual report on EU development aid targets •Future approach to EU budget support •Policy coherence for development •Increasing the impact of EU development policy and Agenda for Change What is significant?

Today is the day for interesting research findings. Here is a summary of a study that looked at whether children fared better in a country with a wider safety net than the United States. Researchers compared child outcomes in the U.S. and Great Britain, which offers families and children a broader range of social services. Their conclusion: It didn’t seem to make any difference. The risk factors for behavioral problems did not appear to be mitigated by stronger social services, affirming the researchers’ earlier findings of the critical role of parents to healthy child development.

Some $60 million has been set aside in the national budget for the 2012/2013 fiscal year for initiatives to improve the quality of early childhood schools and care facilities, as well as to strengthen organisations and institutions delivering such services

Last week UNICEF commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the adoption of ‘A World Fit for Children’ – the agenda that the leaders of some 180 nations adopted in 2002 at the close of the United Nations Special Session on Children. When world leaders meet again in Brazil for the Rio+20 Conference in just over 4 weeks, will they remember those commitments and put children at the center of sustainable development?

The Dutch children's ombudsman has called for better monitoring of children living in poverty in the Netherlands. According to the first edition of the Netherlands Children's Rights Monitor, one in 10 children in the country grows up in poverty.

Trigger warning: Some links within this post may be disturbing and can potentially cause emotional and psychological stress. Please indulge in positive self-care if you experience such reactions and seek out a friend or professional to talk to. There is a public video on Facebook that depicts what appears to be a young Desi woman beating a young baby. The video is heart-wrenching as the taped abuse goes on for more than four minutes. It can be inferred that the abuse started before the taping and that it continued after the taping.

The future of about 76 million African children is doomed, with the likelihood of all of them ending up in poverty, because inequality on the continent has placed limitations on their surroundings.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has launched on Mother's Day in Latin America raft of new social programmes for low-income families with young children.

About one in three 10-year-old children say their parents work too hard, and about one-quarter of all parents agree, according to new research by the Australian Institute for Family Studies.

THE Dalai Lama was awarded a US-born philanthropist's prize for "exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension" today - and immediately donated the $US1.77 million prize money to charity.

There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the health and well-being of Utah kids, according to the Voices for Utah Children’s “Utah KIDS COUNT” study, released Monday.

In Europe and Central Asia (ECA), we are helping our clients to “invest smartly”. Over the past few years, as demographic shifts in ECA countries deepened, the number of school-aged children diminished substantially. At the same time, the global economic crisis created significant pressures on public budgets. For the education sector, the result of these rapidly changing realities was an increased attention to efficiency of expenditures and - in particular- to the right-sizing of the education service delivery networks.

Malda: In a state where police inaction is frowned upon, police initiative in favour of a noble cause was rewarded with assault at a Malda village. Mob attacked three policemen after they tried to stall a child marriage at Gumaidanga village under Bamangola police station on Saturday. The cops were hospitalised and five persons were arrested in connection with the assault.

Poverty and a lack of women’s maternal education is resulting in 40 percent of four million Indonesian infants, or about 1.6 million children, suffering through malnutrition.

Though Mother's Day was observed on Sunday, hardly few anganwadis support pregnant women, lactating mothers and ensure proper nutrition and care. Of the 4.36 lakh pregnant women and lactating mothers, around 2.1 lakh receive support at 33,115 anganwadis across the state.

For Meena Chaudhary, this year will mark not only her sixth wedding anniversary, but also five years since her newborn baby died in the delivery room.

..for House Republicans, their preferred alternative of cutting lower-priority spending means… a $36 billion cut in food stamps (SNAP), which largely helps the elderly, disabled people, children and the working poor. Two million people would lose their benefits entirely and 44 million would have their benefits reduced—the current average benefit is $4 per person per day. Two hundred and eighty thousand low-income children would also lose automatic access to free school breakfast and lunch.

Many children and their families fleeing Mali must contend not only with food insecurity, but inadequate living conditions and sanitation. Soon, says one aid group, the rainy season could make delivering aid more challenging.

Three years from the deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals, two-thirds of countries will not reach MDGs 4 and 5 (child and maternal mortality, respectively). And now the second food price rise in three years is a wake-up call for the development community.

Early Childhood Development (ECD) is critical in the well-being of a child. There is a positive link between early childhood learning and future holistic development of a child which, has not been clearly understood as revealed by Uganda's policy on ECD. Mrs Mary Ojacor chairper-son, ECD Training Institutions Association and director DOT ECD Centre tells us about the state of ECD centres in Uganda are in.

THE welfare agency, Anglicare Sydney, has criticised the federal budget for pandering to middle-income earners while missing a chance to focus on children in the most vulnerable families. Its harsh assessment came as it released a report showing it had helped at least 26,000 children in Sydney and Wollongong over the past four years with basic necessities such as food.

Business needs to be concerned about child poverty, if only because today's children are tomorrow's workforce, says a business lobby group.

According to the Armenia Demographic and Health Survey (ADHS) 2010, infant mortality in Armenia has dropped over the last five years from 26 to 13 deaths per 1,000 live births. The number of Armenian children aged 18-29 months, fully vaccinated according to the World Health Organization and the Armenian Ministry of Health standards, has also increased from 74 percent to 87 percent since 2005. At the same time, nearly 19 percent of children under five experience stunted growth or are too short for their age due to chronic malnutrition, while 15 percent of their peers are overweight.

Media reports about Mozambique usually paint a rosy picture of a country with a soaring economy, a young but stable democracy and a bright future. But beneath the happy headlines, Mozambique's long-term prospects are being severely undermined by corruption and impunity within the public sector and particularly the education sector - which could cost the country its future.

If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year. New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years

While 42 per cent of India’s children continue to suffer from malnutrition, the Ministry of Women and Child Development failed to spend a single paise of the Rs 430 crore allocated in 2011-12 for two projects dealing with malnutrition.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement reports that during the past four months 5,252 kids landed in U.S. custody without a parent or guardian, almost double what it was from the same period a year ago. Last month alone 1,390 youths arrived.

When it comes to the length of pregnancy and child health, recent studies have highlighted the adverse consequences of both extremes.

The fight against child and maternal mortality is one of the Millennium Goals. But one reason for lack of progress is malnutrition and poor diet - in turn caused by rising global food prices.

Hassana came out of her parent's mud hut in Daki-Biu, a slum within Abuja carrying a bucket. She waddled through the slimy and muddy lane to another compound down the street to fetch water from a well, waited for her turn as the other children there, some clad in rag like clothes fetched theirs. She returns to a makeshift shack outside their hut to take her bath. There was no sign of electricity or toilet facilities in sight.

More than 200,000 working couples with around 450,000 children have lost up to £73 a week they were getting in allowances to boost low incomes. Critics claimed the situation was an “absolute calamity” that would push hundreds of thousands of families into hardship.

May is being observed as Child Month against the backdrop of significant public concern here in Jamaica about the state and well-being of the nation’s children, particularly in the context of reports of physical and sexual abuse against minors.

Some 15 million babies worldwide – more than one in ten births – are born too early, according to a new United Nations-backed report, released today, which calls for steps such as ensuring the requisite medicines and equipment and training health staff to promote child survival.

"the main problem in education isn't teachers. The main problem is poverty”... Johns Hopkins University researcher James Coleman authored his landmark study, "Equality of Educational Opportunity”, which was expected to show that minority students were being denied a quality education due to inadequate funding of schools. Instead, Coleman found that other factors, such as the income and educational level of a child's family and classmates, were more important determinants of success.

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has examined the impact of the economic downturn on households in Northern Ireland since 2009. It said half of the 120,000 children living in poverty are in a household with at least one working parent.

The government is set to empower states to take over unregistered orphanages and child-care homes on the ground of child abuse or any other irregularity. A key change proposed in the Juvenile Justice Act is a follow-up of the reported abuse of children in Delhi-based Arya Orphanage in February this year.

This week more than 7500 government and non-government schools across Australia will start taking part in the world’s most comprehensive collection of information about the development of Australia’s children.

A chapter by OPHI researchers on child poverty has appeared in a new UNICEF book “Child Poverty and Inequality: New Perspectives”. The chapter by Sabina Alkire, OPHI Director, and José Manuel Roche, OPHI Research Officer, explains how the Alkire Foster method of multidimensional measurement can be used to create multidimensional measures of child poverty. The chapter explains some of the advantages of moving beyond income and consumption measures of child poverty and the policy-relevance of using a multidimensional lens on deprivation in childhood. For the full report see here.

The World Bank will support the Government of Mozambique in its effort to extend Early Childhood Development services in 600 rural communities. Through these community-based services, early attention to cognitive, linguistic, socio-emotional and physical skills is expected to help 84,000 young children increase their chances of success in primary school and beyond.

When Huang Dongyan visited home to celebrate the Lunar New Year in 2011, her son refused to call her "Mom." Huang, 38, tried coaxing him with baby talk and tickles. But five-year-old Zhang Yi ignored her and buried his face in his hat. For the rest of her visit he avoided her, favoring the attention of his 17-year-old sister, Zhang Juanzi, instead. Huang's every attempt at intimacy -- games, shopping trips, cuddles -- was rebuffed. "I was a stranger to my son," Huang recalls, blinking back tears.

Making safety nets available across the developing world is one of the World Bank’s key themes and was discussed at the 2012 Spring Meetings held in April in Washington D.C. Among many country examples, the Philippines has embraced a unique approach with promising results... In 2008, the food, fuel and global financial crises prompted the Philippine government to expand a conditional cash transfer program, Pantawid Pamilya, with the support of the World Bank and other partners. The program targets chronically poor households with children ages 0-14 living in poor areas. Households that qualify receive cash in return for sending children to school, regularly visiting health centers and for undertaking preventive check-ups for pregnant women.

The Ministry of Health and Medical Services and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today declared the National Referral Hospital in Honiara, Solomon Islands “Mother-and-Baby Friendly”. It is the first hospital in the Pacific to meet expanded standards for both mother and baby friendliness. Previous accreditations were limited to “baby-friendly” standards

Facing History and Ourselves has partnered with The Bully Project to document viewer responses to the newly released documentary, ‘BULLY’ (official trailer), which offers an intimate, unflinching look at how bullying has touched five children and their families in the United States. Education News recently highlighted the video of audience responses, which captured how viewers at one New York City screening were moved by the film and, more importantly, what they planned to do about it. Click here to watch the Be the Difference 2012 video. An educational partner on BULLY, Facing History has created an official facilitator’s guide that helps adult and student audiences confront the film’s stories and explore the meaning for their schools and wider communities.

“Some 57 infants under one year die from every 1,000 live births and 75 per 1000 live births die before reaching the age of five. And up to 733 mothers die from child birth complications for every 100,000 live births recorded,” Health Secretary, Pascoe Kase highlights at the ceremony

United Kingdom: Measures to track levels of child poverty should be based on life chances rather than finances, Labour MP Frank Field has said.

The Gillard Government today announced the creation of a National Children’s Commissioner within the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Ghana has become the first African country to introduce pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines at the same time, simultaneously tackling the leading causes of the world’s two biggest childhood killers – pneumonia and diarrhoea.

As the 10th edition of UNICEF’s Progress for Children shows, this report card is mixed. While we have made significant progress for millions of children over the last decades – reducing child mortality, increasing the number of children enrolled in primary school, expanding access to health care services – our efforts have left behind far too many adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19.

I had the chance to help protect a life today, the life of a little girl named Madeleine Isaac. World Immunization Week (WIW) builds on nine years of ever-growing Vaccination Week regional campaigns that have led to the vaccination of more than 365 million people.

MORE children acrossNorthern Ireland could be pushed into poverty with the introduction of welfare reforms, it has been claimed.

Neuroscience research suggests that 80 per cent of our brain development occurs between conception and the age of three. By age four, 92 per cent of our brain has developed. The discovery of the rapid pace of brain growth during our youngest years is causing us to rethink the way we view early childhood.

This week, UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake, alongside partners in the newly renamed Measles and Rubella Initiative, launched a new global strategy aimed at reducing measles deaths and congenital rubella syndrome to zero. The announcement coincided with the first-ever World Immunization Week, and was accompanied by new data showing that accelerated efforts have resulted in a 74 per cent reduction in global measles mortality, from an estimated 535,000 deaths in 2000 to 139,000 in 2010.

Malaria claims thousands of young lives in the DRC each year, but a successful project in remote Kimbi shows it needn't be so

So far this year 14 schools have been burnt down in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in northern Nigeria, forcing over 7,000 children out of formal education and pushing down enrolment rates in an already ill-educated region. In a video posted on YouTube in February, Boko Haram, the Islamic jihadist group based in Nigeria, called on its followers to destroy schools providing western education

Rotavirus vaccines offer the best hope for preventing severe rotavirus disease and the deadly dehydrating diarrhoea that it causes. Diarrhoea is one of the top two killers of children under five years of age worldwide, and rotavirus is the leading cause of severe and fatal diarrhoea in infants and young children. Each year, rotavirus causes more than 450,000 deaths in children under five and is responsible for millions of hospitalizations and clinic visits.

We all know that factors related to poverty can limit learning in a number of ways. Lack of quality early-childhood care and education impedes healthy development and kindergarten readiness. Inadequate access to preventive and basic remedial health care substitute sick days and emergency room visits for classroom time and reduce student awareness and focus in class.

University of Maryland Child Development Lab Director Nathan Fox says this latest study by Duke University researchers’ points to the effect of constant, violent stress on the tip of the DNA strand called Telomeres. Exposure to violence shortens Telomeres, which makes the cells older. For example a seven year old who deals with violence could have a cellular age of a 17 year old. That means they could develop diseases of aging at an earlier age than their peers.

A new global strategy aims to reduce measles deaths and congenital rubella syndrome to zero. The strategy comes with the publication of new data using a state-of-the-art methodology showing that efforts to reduce measles deaths have resulted in a 74% reduction in global measles deaths, from an estimated 535 300 deaths in 2000 to 139 300 in 2010.

A new plan to reach 90% of children by 2015 with measles and rubella vaccines is launched, but needs more money if it is to succeed where the last effort fell short.

A decade after President Robert Mugabe launched a "fast-track" resettlement programme that chased 4,500 white commercial farmers off the land, Zimbabwe's rural landscape has been transformed. The whites who owned vast tracts of land have been replaced by 150,000 black small-scale farmers and their families, creating the need for a rethink in the provision of education and health facilities. Headteacher Obed Saki, 43, says 293 children attend the primary school in the once-grand Italianate villa. "It opened in 2002, but we only received textbooks in 2010," he says.

Globally, there are about 50 million more children in school today than there were just over a decade ago. There are still challenges in achieving universal access – more than 67 million children are still denied this basic right – but it is important we now also focus on ensuring that children in school actually learn

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today stressed the need to provide reproductive health care for young people, as well as give them access to the necessary information and the means to protect themselves from sexual abuse and violence... “Sixteen million adolescent girls become mothers every year, and every day, more than 2,000 young people contract HIV,” Mr. Ban said. “We have a collective responsibility to drive these numbers down.”

At the National Vaccine Summit held last week in Abuja, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator Anyim Pius Anyim declared that despite the availability of simple cost effective measures such as vaccines, Nigeria continued to lose estimated one million Nigerian children each year due to unverified stories about vaccination.

At a meeting today called by UNICEF and The World Bank, donors announced new plans to greatly expand access to improved water and sanitation for millions of people over the next two years.

The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics will release official standards for wellbeing in July that will go beyond “stand alone measures such as GDP” to instead be “relevant and founded on what matters to people.” As an extension of this same concept, a U.K.-based consulting firm has developed an evaluation tool for organizations that work with 11 to 16-year olds that identifies eight aspects of wellbeing and tracks change over time.

The recent food price spikes of 2007/08 and 2010/11 have prevented millions of households from escaping poverty, with urban and female-headed households especially vulnerable. Diverse evidence shows that the quantity and quality of nutrition is adversely affected through higher food prices, which does not bode well for the MDGs related to nutrition, child and maternal mortality. This is compounded by the findings that proper nutrition in the first two years of a child’s life are critical and that even a temporary reduction in nutritional intake due to higher food prices can affect children’s long-term development.

The First lady Mrs. Jeannette Kagame has emphasised the importance of investing in Early Childhood Development Programmes to ensure Rwanda's overall development.

In education, we know that the progress towards gender equality has really been remarkable, especially in enrollments, to the point where we are now seeing boys and young men at a disadvantage in some regions. Yet, we all know that there is a lot more to be done. Even in terms of the most basic indicator, enrollment, girls still face a severe disadvantage in many areas, with 35 million girls still out of school.

Every child has a right to an education. Yet millions of children are living in countries where that right is systematically violated as a result of armed conflict. It is time for the international community to stop this state of affairs by getting serious about its responsibility to protect education in all countries, irrespective of the barriers created by armed conflict.

Why Learning for All? Because we simply cannot be indifferent to the large numbers of children in developing countries who do not get the chance to go to school, and who thus cannot count or read or put thoughts together—basic skills that are their ticket to a life without poverty.

Four million more children a year are living beyond their fifth birthday than in 1990, a new report for Save the Children and Unicef has found.

Concern Worldwide CEO, Mr. Tom Arnold, was among the global leaders appointed today by Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, to a high-level international working group tasked with tackling child malnutrition in the world’s poorest countries

For the sake of hegemony, Israel is mortgaging the well-being of its children and the lives of its grandchildren, together with the well-being and lives of children and grandchildren throughout the region.

Rising admissions to child therapeutic feeding centres highlight growing urgency of situation in one of Sahel's driest, most remote areas.

72 % of children in lower-income households do not receive the balanced diet recommended by the Department of Health.

Only 10 percent of families have registered their children in schools.

UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, with UNESCO Cairo Office, Global Campaign for Education and other partner organizations in the Arab region, will hold a regional ECCE policy meeting from 24 to 25 April 2012 in Beirut which set within the context of the EFA Global Action Week is a follow-up to the Damascus and Moscow Conferences on ECCE in 2010.

More than 10,000 children of asylum seekers are being forced to live "far below the poverty line" because benefit payments are "shockingly low", according to a report by the Children's Society.

Home to 1.9 million young children; 50% of Delhi’s children live in its slum and squatter settlements. The capital has one of the worst track records on sex ratio (865 girls per 1000 boys) and 50% of the poor women in the reproductive age group are anemic, according to the NFHS-III data. Just one in every four children among the poor is fully immunized. One in every three children is underweight and stunted. Fifteen percent are acutely malnourished and two thirds suffer from nutritional anemia (NFHS-III).

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In a classic case of neglect, Kerala covers only less than one third of its children under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) of the Centre, which is much less than the national average and worse than the states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir.

Plight of 13-year-old locked in house while employers went on holiday sparks revulsion. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least four million domestic servants in India, including about 100,000 children working in and around Delhi.

One in four children in Bexar County lives in poverty, an 8 percent increase since 2000, according to a new study assessing the health and well-being of family and youth in Texas.

The Viet Nam General Nutrition Survey 2009–10 report, released April 4th revealed that one out of three children under the age of five suffers from malnutrition and that children in remote areas suffer the consequences of malnutrition at a rate twice as high as those who grew up in more developed regions of the country.

UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake has called for an urgent escalation in humanitarian efforts in the Sahel region of Africa to prevent the deaths of more than 1 million children. An estimated 127,300 children under age 5 are already suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

Social groups and citizens have expressed their grave concern over the rising menace of child labour in twin cities, saying the ever-increasing poverty in the country is the main reason behind child labour.

Nearly 20 million children under the age of five around the world are afflicted with severe acute malnutrition, globally, 170-180 million children are stunted. Uganda, national figures indicate that 33 per cent of children under the age of 5 are stunted.

Romania, one of the European Union's poorest members, early schooling is now seen as "an important step to fight the vicious circle of poverty-school-failure-poverty". Romania has the EU's highest rate of children 17 and under living in poverty -- almost 49 percent, according to figures published by the European statistical office Eurostat in February. This compares to 27 per cent in the EU as a whole, 29 percent in Britain and barely 14 percent in Finland.

Kids Count has released its 18th annual report on the well being of Rhode Island's children reporting that 12 percent of Rhode Island children are living in a household with at least one unemployed parent and that close to 17 percent are living in poverty.

Providing education to boys and girls is essential for the development of societies, said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday

'Urgent action is required to improve child health in New Zealand and ensuring the wellbeing of our youngest citizens is an ethical issue for our nation, says NZMA Chair Dr Paul Ockelford'. New Zealand's investment in children is low by OECD standards and reports have highlighted that socioeconomic factors have had a major impact on child health with many preventable diseases, such as infectious and respiratory diseases, prevalent in our most vulnerable communities and leading to increasing rates of hospital admissions.

A British study reports that when a boy’s natural father is absent, he becomes more likely to have a child by the age of 23. This effect was strongest in boys whose father were absent by the time the boy turned seven, 44 percent of whom had sired at least one child of their own by the age of 23 (compared with 37 percent of boys from two-parent families).

Wang Ronghua, director of the Shanghai Education Development Foundation reports that males account for about 80 percent of the high school students who were rated as "poor students" in the 2011 annual senior high school entrance exam.

Focusing on the implenentation of quality Early Child Development (ECD) policies and programs throughout Latin America, the initiative assists an estimated 5 million mothers and children aged 0-6 years through a diverse range of programs which include mapping services in 28 Brazilian municipalities across 10 states www.bemtevibrasil.com; supporting Government provided nutrition services which reach about 60,000 families living in the poorest districts of Peru; protecting and enhancing the human capital of approximately 35,000 young children in violence–prone urban areas in El Salvador.

Equity for Children interviews Associate Research Director of Young Lives, University of Oxford, Dr Martin Woodward on why it is important to listen to children's perspectives. To acces the interview see here.

Office for National Statistics says 35% of this year's 826,000 new babies could still be alive in 2112.

Research suggests happier childhoods influence the likelihood that an individual will go on to enjoy higher earnings later in life.

88% of the South Sudanese women and 76% of the men are illiterate. The survey is set to access the quality and quantity of the teachers and their services including the number of the students in the Alternative Education System (AES). This is expected to give the Ministry a way of developing a national policy from the final survey report.

Political instability, civil strif

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