Overview
Swaziland’s National Development Strategy largely embraces the Millennium Development Goals. However, the country’s impressive economic growth and prosperity after independence – late 1960s and the early 1990s - has been reversed over the last decade. A per capita income of US $1,350 places Swaziland in the low middle income ranking of nations, and thus limits access to concessional loans and assistance. Ten percent of the population (total 1.1 million) controls more than 40 percent of the wealth, while 69 percent of the people live below the poverty line of E128.6 per month (US$0.8 per day). While changes in global trade rules and in regional comparative advantages are hammering the country’s economic prospects from without, AIDS is undermining foundations of social capital from within. Illnesses undermine productivity and competitiveness of the formal sector, while health and funeral costs consume family capital required for livelihood activities. Drought, which started in 2001, has become a recurrent phenomenon in all regions of the country by 2006, deepening poverty and vulnerability. The government, in response declared a state of emergency in 2004. However, the real emergency, countrywide, is rooted in the world’s most severe HIV and AIDS epidemic. HIV prevalence among pregnant women grew to 42.6 percent in 2004 and dropped to 39.2 percent in 2006. More than 200,000 people are living with HIV (2004) out of the country’s population of 1.1 million, and more than 4,000 infections occur annually in infants. Under-five mortality, estimated by the UN at 90 deaths per thousand in 1997, is presently estimated at 156, while life expectancy has declined to 37 years from an estimated 57 years a decade ago. Approximately 40 percent of children are stunted, and 12 percent are malnourished. Rural access to safe water, measured at 41 percent in 2000 (MICS), has seen little progress in coverage since the 1980s. As AIDS decimates a generation in the 20-49 year old age group, extended family social safety nets are being stretched to the breaking point. In some families only the vulnerable elderly and the children are left alive. The number of orphans in the country has increased from an estimated 12,000 in 1999 to about 70,000 in 2005. Still other children are left in the care of grandparents or other rural relatives who are ill, abusive, or themselves vulnerable, while parents seek urban employment. The impact of the epidemic has not yet peaked, and the results for children are ominous - expanding school drop-out; deteriorating nutritional status; breakdown of non-formal family and community institutions; and signs of social breakdown in the form of violence, rape, abuse, and abandonment of infants. UNICEF is supporting the Government to provide safety nets to stop the destructive cycle by creating a protective environment in which children have the best possible start in life, and with ample opportunities to develop their individual capacities. The priority programme areas are:
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