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

4- Accelerating the response to the AIDS pandemic
While Mozambique has achieved significant progress in reducing the under five
mortality rate, the gains of recent years are being increasingly threatened by the
impact of the AIDS pandemic and capacity constraints continue to impede the
national response. Although the available evidence indicates that AIDS is fast
becoming a major cause of infant and child mortality, at the end of 2005 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 (PMTCT). Unless there is a
significant and accelerated scale-up of interventions in these areas, the development
gains of recent years will be dramatically reversed.
5- Managing aid inflows for improved child outcomes
There is a rapidly evolving aid environment in Mozambique, in which donors are
increasingly moving away from ad hoc ‘project-based’ funding towards General
Budget Support, accompanied by greater alignment with government policy and
strategy and harmonisation between development partners. However, while
addressing the complex structural barriers in aid delivery will require long-term,
sustained investment in infrastructure and strengthening of institutional capacity, as
PARPA II highlights, there is a need to ensure that (potential) additional aid inflows are
targeted towards programmes that can deliver ‘step change’ in child development
outcomes. Obvious candidates include large-scale programmes which deliver clear
benefits for children, such as the comprehensive scaling-up of the distribution of
long-lasting, insecticide-treated nets, vaccination campaigns, or the accelerated
expansion of access to paediatric treatment and drugs for the prevention of mother
to child transmission of HIV. Since childhood poverty and disease can undermine an
individual’s lifetime development prospects, there is a clear rationale for addressing
these as soon as possible.
6- Strengthening the capacity of civil society and promoting community
participation
Given the varying capacity of Government authorities, particularly at the sub-national
level, to implement and monitor programmes for children, civil society continues to
play a critical role both in creating demand for services and supporting the authorities
to expand service delivery. As civil society organisations tend to be based at the
grassroots level, they are also often well placed to ensure that the most vulnerable
children and women are reached by development programmes and to advocate for
children’s rights. The work of civil society is vital, for example, in supporting OVC
to access basic services: the 2005 Situation Analysis of Orphaned and Vulnerable
Children indicated that OVC households are significantly more likely to have been
reached by civil society than by Government outreach activities. Civil society
organisations also play a vital role in ensuring that government commitments are
met, for example through implementation of national action plans and policies and
participation in the monitoring of the PARPA.
In tackling childhood poverty, it is also important to recognise that children have
the right to participate in matters that affect them and need to be empowered and
supported to participate in designing and implementing measures for the reduction of
childhood poverty.
CHILDHOOD POVERTY IN MOZAMBIQUE: A SITUATION AND TRENDS ANALYSIS
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