UN urges world to help Zimbabwe's forgotten children

The suffering of Zimbabwean children is being forgotten in a stand-off over politics and aid, the UN Children’s Fund said today.

Zimbabwe suffers the world’s fourth-highest HIV infection rate and has seen the highest rise in child mortality, yet receives just a fraction of the donor funding lavished on other countries in the region, Unicef said.

Donors cite concern that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s increasingly autocratic regime would use any assistance for political purposes.

“The world must differentiate between the politics and the people of Zimbabwe,” Carol Bellamy, on her final African tour as Unicef’s executive director, said in Johannesburg.

“Every day children in Zimbabwe are dying of HIV/Aids. Every day children are becoming infected, orphaned, and forced to leave school to care for sick parents.”

One in every eight Zimbabwean children dies before the age of five, a 50% increase since 1990, Unicef said. A child dies every 15 minutes due to Aids complications, and one in five are now orphans – one million of them because of Aids.

Amnesty International reported this week that the state-run Grain Marketing Board continues to manipulate the distribution of food aid, denying opposition supporters access to maize, the staple for most Zimbabweans in the run-up to the general election on March 31.