Child Poverty in Mozambique. A Situation and Trend ... - Unicef

in the nutritional status of children, childbirth care showed little improvement and
all household surveys since 2000 show no increase in the use of safe water and
sanitation. In 2003, 49 per cent of children under five years of age experienced severe
water deprivation, while 47 per cent experienced severe sanitation deprivation.
In addition, while AIDS is fast emerging as a major killer of children, with an
estimated 99,000 children living with HIV or AIDS, by mid 2006 only 3 per cent of
eligible children were receiving paediatric treatment and only 5 per cent of the total
estimated HIV positive pregnant women in the country had received treatment for the
prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.
The impact of family child care practices on early childhood development is
identified as being of particularly high importance, going some way to explaining the
discrepancy between progress in socio-economic and anthropological measures of
child development. This in turn suggests a crucial role for information dissemination
in changing cultural attitudes to child care and thereby improving child development
outcomes.
The situation in relation to education
The situation in relation to education is reviewed in Chapter Four. Since 1992 there
have been impressive increases in gross and net enrolment ratios at both primary and
secondary level. In spite of these increases, however, 24 per cent of children aged
between 7 and 17 were experiencing severe education deprivation in 2003, having
never attended school. Furthermore, the rapid increase in enrolment has not been
matched by increased investment in the quality of education or adaptive strategies to
deal with the corresponding ‘access shock’. As a result, the status against indicators
on the internal efficiency and quality of education remains poor: less than one third
of children successfully complete their primary education, which is particularly
worrying given the fundamental importance of basic education for growth and poverty
reduction.
In addition, there is now an urgent need to invest in the post-primary school system
(i.e. secondary and technical schools) so as to catch up with the increasing demand
for places and produce sufficient numbers of qualified teachers to staff primary
schools. At present, there is an acute shortage of secondary schools in the country
and access to secondary education predominantly benefits children living in urban
areas and those from the wealthiest families (often one and the same households).
Furthermore, the deteriorating pupil-teacher ratios and increases in the proportion
of unqualified teachers appear to have disproportionately affected secondary level
education, a situation that is predicted to worsen in the near future, due to the loss
of trained teachers to better paid jobs in other sectors, non-teaching posts in the
education sector, or as a result of the impact of HIV/AIDS.
While trends in the literacy rate are positive, over half of the population is still not
literate, with significant disparities between rural and urban areas (66 per cent and 26
per cent not literate respectively) and between women and men (67 per cent nonliteracy
among women compared with 34 per cent among men).
In terms of access to information, 39 per cent of children aged between 5 and
17 were experiencing severe information deprivation in 2003. This has serious
implications for the survival and healthy development of children, particularly
regarding access to information on HIV/AIDS. While knowledge of HIV prevention
improved greatly between 1997 and 2003, the level of knowledge remains low,
particularly among young women, and shows marked provincial variations.
CHILDHOOD POVERTY IN MOZAMBIQUE: A SITUATION AND TRENDS ANALYSIS
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