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Mandela and Machel to lead global children's initiative

Saturday, 6 May 2000: Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela and child rights champion Graça Machel today proposed an ambitious new global partnership for children and pledged to play a direct and personal role in urging other leaders to join them.

With UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy by their side, Mr. Mandela and Ms. Machel announced plans to build a partnership of global leaders who would be at the vanguard of a "bold new movement to turn the world around for millions of children."

"Over the next few months we will be personally calling upon leaders from all sectors to work with us to find solutions to the major problems faced by children and adolescents," Mr. Mandela said.

"We are not seeking and will not accept vague promises," Mr. Mandela added. "Our purpose is to get specific commitments from these leaders and specific results. We will challenge enlightened government leaders to join us and turn their words into deeds. We will ask innovators in the business world to put their unique abilities to work for children. We will call upon leaders in academia, the media, and other sectors to join with us to ensure that the world honours its obligation to children," he said.

"One of the first challenges we will be tackling will be the effects of armed conflict on children. Together with the Canadian Government and UNICEF we will be bringing together, for the first time, world leaders in September in Winnipeg, to ensure that as leaders we take action to protect children from violations of their rights in conflict" said Ms. Machel, author of a landmark United Nations study on children in conflict.

UNICEF said tens of millions of children are lost within a vortex of poverty, preventable disease, armed conflict and discrimination that deprives them of their right to basic health and education.

"We know the challenges," said Ms. Machel "Protecting children from conflict, defeating preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS, and dispelling poverty and discrimination. And we know what results we seek," she added. "We want a world in which children survive and develop in a caring environment free of abuse and exploitation, a world that offers every child a quality basic education, and a world in which adolescents are no longer invisible but in which they are invited, instead, to participate in shaping their own futures."

Ms. Bellamy said the involvement of Mr. Mandela and Ms. Machel would be a source of inspiration to other leaders. "Together they have the power to pull people from a wide range of backgrounds; people who are willing to push beyond the traditional boundaries of what societies do for children," she said. "Many of the promises of the 1990s have failed largely because of a lack of leadership. With this initiative our ambition is to inspire and renew that leadership -- and to get concrete, actionable commitments from a class of people who have the personal and professional resources to deliver."

"Through hard-won experience, the world today really knows what works for children. And the world has the resources to use that knowledge," Ms. Bellamy added. "The advance of communication technologies offers us an unprecedented opportunity to reach children and their families, and place knowledge and power in their hands," she pointed out. She said that leaders in technology and communication industries would be among the first approached by UNICEF, Mr. Mandela and Ms. Machel.

Mr. Mandela and Ms. Machel insisted that, with committed leadership, major advancements for children could be made within a single generation, adding that such advancements are the right of every child.

"Children are the nucleus of sustainable human development, there is no doubt about that," Ms. Machel asserted. "Relatively small investments in their health, education and general welfare pay huge dividends for societies as a whole. But we are also talking about doing what we know in our hearts to be right -- and fulfilling what the world has recognized are the rights of every child.

"Nonetheless, if the fundamental rights behind our cause are not sufficient to move people to act, then let it be the economic and social rationale behind it. Either way, we are going to challenge people to act."

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Mandel and Machel to lead global partnership for children

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