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Debt denies children's and women's rights

"Children and women have an absolute right to basic education and health. Nations freed from excessive debt burdens are prepared to make these rights a reality and their creditors have a moral obligation to help them do so," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. "On the eve of the new millennium, it is no longer tolerable that hundreds of millions of people be held in debt bondage to the world's rich countries. The G8 ministers could take the lead in ensuring that countless millions of children and women are no longer victims of, but, instead, participants in, today's global economic system."

Ms. Bellamy said a growing international movement favours dramatic debt relief and urged the G8 ministers to make significant reforms in the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative. HIPC was launched in 1996 to provide relief to 41 of the world's poorest nations -- the great majority of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa -- but has failed to move far and fast enough to achieve its modest objectives. Few target nations have benefited and, because HIPC relief is tied to export earnings, plummeting commodity prices have dealt an unexpected added blow to the initiative.

Ms. Bellamy said it is a sad irony that this year's 10th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child coincides with the tenth year of a virtual free-fall in economic development assistance to the world's poorest nations. "That only makes it more imperative that debt relief be given a human face," she said.

UNICEF's appeal coincides with the Day of the African Child, and Ms. Bellamy urged G8 ministers to take special heed of how the external debt crisis has hurt sub-Saharan Africa, which owed $84 billion in 1980 and now owes more than $225 billion.

"Sub-Saharan Africa is caught in a debt trap which creates an impossible drain on the region's fragile economies," Ms. Bellamy said. "Child mortality rates in this region are one-third higher than the average for other developing countries, and maternal mortality rates are nearly three times greater. More than a third of the children have not been immunised and approximately half the population is illiterate. Yet the region is forced to spend more on servicing its external debt than on the health and education of its 306 million children."

Ms. Bellamy said the process of HIPC reform has been ongoing and noted that UNICEF has joined others in offering detailed proposals regarding the initiative. The agency's three key recommendations are:

• Eligibility for debt relief should not be based on exports alone, as is the case under the current HIPC initiative, but should also be based on the share of debt servicing in the national budget.
• Debt relief should directly benefit public spending on basic social services.
• Debtor countries should not be required to wait six years, as HIPC now stipulates, to become eligible for relief.

A growing chorus of groups has called for an end to the grossly unreasonable debt burden, including Jubilee 2000, a global movement of religious institutions, labour unions and humanitarian organisations which advocate an outright cancellation of the debt owed by many of the world's poorest countries by the year 2000.

"The struggle against destitution is on," Ms. Bellamy said. "Breaking the hold of destitution is far less expensive than bearing the moral and financial costs of permitting acute poverty to continue. We can no longer accept a situation in which debt repayment is often double or triple the aggregate amount a poor country spends on basic education and primary health care. The current situation is a vicious cycle which will entrap generations in the same poverty and hopelessness that prevail in much of the world today."

Ms. Bellamy said it was not only morally indefensible but economically unsound to allow the debt crisis to persist.

"Universal access to basic social services like education and health will be a great stimulus to economic growth. No country has ever reached its development goals when the majority of its people are suffering the deep poverty facing hundreds of millions in the world today. The G8 meeting in Cologne should be a crossroads where the wealthy of the world recognise that economic reform and human development are not opposed but entirely interdependent."

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