This is Hamisi, an 11 year who has a career as a miner.
Hamisi dropped out of his third year of primary school and left his home village after his father was unable to pay for his uniform and school fees. Although Hamisi’s parents have their own half-acre coffee farm, their income fell sharply because of the decline in the market price for coffee throughout the world. Hamisi works up to 18 hours and earns between 60 cents to $ 1.2 a day.
The health of the children like Hamisi is very poor, as they breathe in the harmful graphite dust found in the mines and have poor nutrition, surviving on 1 meal a day.
Child slavery in big industries such as agriculture and manufacturing is an ongoing issue, and they are slowly being resolved by governments and organizations fighting child labor. Stories such as the ones mentioned above are common scenarios in developing countries where there are large sections of the population who are still deep in poverty.
Facts:
+ 8.4 M in the last 4 years alone. According to a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, the number of children in labour has increased to 160 million worldwide.
72.1 M are estimated to be in child labour in Africa. 9% of African children are in hazardous work – the highest of all the world’s regions representing 31.5 million.
1 in 5 children in Africa are employed against their will in farms and mines.
Recommendations:
Increase the number of years for compulsory education.
Create more job opportunities with higher salaries for parents.
Set a minimum age at which people can legally be employed.
Diabetes is a chronic health condition that has been increasing globally and in the Middle East in particular. The global estimate of people living with diabetes in 2019 is half a billion and is estimated to increase by 25 % in 2030 and reach 51 % by 2045. The below Map shows high prevalence of diabetes in the middle east with specific high levels in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon reaching an average Diabetes prevalence of 19.6%.Potential solutions can follow an Upstream approach – or addressing the problem at its source by decreasing the risk of developing diabetes from infancy. According to CDC evidence suggests that exclusive breastfeeding for a minimum of 6 months in infancy may reduce the prevalence of diabetes in later life. However, the lack of continued support for exclusive breastfeeding led to a recent decline in the practice in the Middle East according to UNICEF.
To validate this point the below map visualization shows that countries with high diabetes prevalence also have low levels of exclusive breastfeeding by mothers for 6 months. Specifically, here we highlight Saudi Arabia’s case in the Middle East which has an average value of only 4.72 %. If we take Peru as an example, the below box plot show that they have high exclusive breastfeeding levels and low prevalence for diabetes.
Recommendations:
In light of these findings, we can conclude that breastfed babies have lower risk of developing diabetes therefore one way to decrease diabetes prevalence would be to decrease the child’s risk for diabetes from infancy. Helpful implementations would include to:
Help pregnant women learn about the importance of breastfeeding for their babies and themselves.
Give mothers the support they need to breastfeed their babies
Use community-based organizations to promote and support breastfeeding
