Nairobi - Western governments should not use the global financial crisis as a reason to cut aid to Africa and thus reduce the chances of lowering the continent's appalling child mortality rate, former president of Mozambique and UN Childrens' Fund (UNICEF) campaigner Joaquim Alberto Chissano said Tuesday.
"I believe that enough resources still exist in the world today... so the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should not be revised just because there is a crisis," Chissano told journalists as he launched UNICEF's first report on the state of Africa's children.
Campaigners are warning that the MDGs, a series of ambitious UN targets aimed at improving the plight of the world's poorest by 2015, could be endangered if developed nations cut back on aid.
Even prior to the financial crisis, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan warned that at the current rate of progress G8 nations would fall 40 billion dollars short of their promises to double aid to Africa by 2010.
Donor nations are meeting in Doha from November 29-December 2 to discuss aid targets, the first serious opportunity to address the effects the financial crisis will have on aid commitments.
Chissano said that continued funding was crucial to help African children escape death from tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDs and diarrhoea.
"The only way to reverse the situation is to persist with funding," he said.
The UNICEF report found that almost 14,000 children under five died each day 2006 and warned that sub-Saharan Africa would have to reduce its under-five mortality rate by more than ten per cent each year to meet targets set for 2015.
"The state of children in Africa is a situation of grave concern," Chissano said. "Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most difficult place for a child under five to live."
Nine sub-Saharan African countries made it into the top ten for the highest under five-mortality rates. Sierra Leone was the worst, with 270 deaths per 1,000 live births, followed by Angola.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria accounted for more than 43 per cent of all under-five deaths in Africa, the report, entitled "The State of Africa's Children 2008: Child Survival," found. (dpa)
