Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's an honour for UNICEF to be here today.
As an agency of the UN, UNICEF works in more countries and saves more children’s lives than any other humanitarian organization. UNICEF Canada was established 60 years ago, and we work as part of the UNICEF family to do whatever it takes to ensure that children survive and thrive, by providing health care and immunization, clean water, nutrition, education, and protection from violence. Here in Canada, we promote public policy and practices in the best interests of children to contribute to the fulfillment of children’s rights, as outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, here in Canada and around the world.
UNICEF and Canada have a long history of partnering to improve the health and well-being of children around the world. For decades—for more than 30 years—the Government of Canada has consistently been one of the top ten government donors to UNICEF, and we've worked in partnership to address some of the most urgent needs of children and their families in the areas of health, nutrition, protection, education, and emergency assistance.
Despite the progress that's been made over the last 25 years, we still know that 17,000 children die every day from preventable causes, where simple low-cost interventions exist to save them. Almost one third of those deaths are preventable by vaccines. Immunization is one of the most cost-effective public health interventions, and UNICEF is the world's leading agency for vaccine procurement. We must continue to support these efforts of vaccination around the world and here in Canada too.
Some of the recent significant progress that we've seen has been in polio, which is almost eradicated. Last year, we were down to about 400 cases in the difficult-to-reach places of the world. Also, in maternal and neonatal tetanus, we have a partnership between UNICEF and Kiwanis that has reduced the number of countries that have to deal with tetanus, from 59 down to 24, over the last 15 years.
We also have partnerships with the Canadian private sector. Diarrhea is one of the leading killers of children, and we work together in India with Teck Resources of Vancouver in scaling up effective diarrhea treatment and strengthening health care systems in some of the most marginalized communities there. We're educating health workers on the effectiveness and use of zinc supplements, along with oral rehydration salts, and strengthening the local supply chain to make sure these treatments are accessible to even the hardest-to-reach children.
Almost half of the child deaths that happen every year have malnutrition as an underlying cause. I wanted to show the members this middle-upper-arm circumference bracelet. Since I'm not a medical person, this is the thing that helps me see what malnutrition means.
A child's bicep doesn't change much between six months and five years, so you can put this middle-upper-arm circumference bracelet—forgive me, those of you who are medical and would give better details than I can—around their bicep, pull it, and then see whether or not they're malnourished. If it's in the green part of the bracelet, they're sufficiently nourished, but if it gets into the yellow and into the red, you have malnutrition. For a child who is suffering from chronic malnutrition—in the yellow—their arm is the size of a toonie. That's what malnutrition is. Not only does it cause half of the deaths, but it also is a huge contributor to stunting.
Stunting affects almost 200 million children under five years of age. It can trap those children in a cycle of poverty, but we know that key interventions, when delivered during the critical 1,000-day period from conception to two years of age, can lead to a reduced prevalence of stunting. Improved maternal and child nutrition gives children a much better start in life.
HIV/AIDS also remains a disproportionally heavy burden on the world's children and adolescents. We project that almost two million children will still require HIV treatment in the year 2020. We believe that the Government of Canada must ensure that investments in the prevention and treatment of AIDS remain central to our maternal and newborn child health efforts.
Something that crosses between health and protection is birth registration. Some 230 million children around the world have not been registered at birth. Without a birth certificate, unregistered children are far less able to access vital social services and the protection they deserve. Birth registration is a means of protection because it can protect children from being prosecuted or punished if they come in contact with the law. A valid birth certificate is so important to enforce minimum age legislation that can protect children from early child marriage, recruitment of children in armed forces, or some of the worst forms of child labour.
We know that protection is a vital part of rearing a healthy child. Canada has been a respected defender of children's rights. It has a strong history of protecting the world's most vulnerable children from violence. We welcome Canada's leadership at the UN General Assembly in securing a resolution towards preventing and eliminating child, early, and forced marriage. We share this commitment to end child marriage along with all forms of violence against children.
Protecting children from violence, exploitation, and abuse helps ensure that those children who survive and benefit from Canada's investment also have the opportunity to thrive. These two efforts—keeping children healthy and safe—work together. Children cannot thrive if they are immunized and well nourished but then suffer from violence. Violence and abuse affect the child's physical and mental health in the short and in the long term. It can impair their ability to learn and socialize, which will impact their transition to adulthood, with adverse consequences later in life.
A child-safe private sector is also key to the protection and realization of children's rights. Businesses have direct and indirect impacts on children's lives through their policies and operations. UNICEF, Save the Children, and the UN Global Compact have developed children's rights and business principles to equip businesses to address their impact on the rights and well-being of children. We at UNICEF Canada are engaging the Canadian extractive sector through the development of guidance and tools and through individual initiatives with companies, associations, and consultancies.
The Government of Canada has a responsibility and an opportunity to ensure that the Canadian private sector is enhancing efforts to protect children from violence, exploitation, and abuse through committing to support the Canadian private sector in respecting and supporting children's rights in their overseas operations. That is why we encourage the government to tie the children's rights and business principles and child rights impact analysis into any funding that goes to the private sector overseas.
This is a critical year for children. World leaders are setting out a road map for human progress that will drive investment and action over the next 15 years. Negotiations for the new post-2015 development agenda are well under way. Over the coming months, discussions will culminate into two critical milestones: the framework for the sustainable development goals, the SDGs, which are set for adoption at the General Assembly in September; and the framework for financing for development in Addis Ababa in July.
UNICEF is firmly committed to ensuring that children remain at the centre of the next development agenda as they have been with the millennium development goals. Furthermore, we believe that an equity-based approach is essential to ensure that the most disadvantaged children are included in future development progress. It's not just the right thing to do. It's in everyone's interest.
I'd like to acknowledge and welcome the Government of Canada's publication and request for feedback on Canada's priorities for the post-2015 development agenda. We see strong synergies with UNICEF and Canada's priorities. UNICEF Canada is pleased to see Canada's commitment to making a priority in child protection, to ending child, forced, and early marriage, and to renewing the global effort to end preventable child and maternal deaths and ensuring access to quality education. We also welcome the fact that Canada has recently become a member of the Group of Friends on Children and the sustainable development goals to advocate for the rights of children and ensure that issues relating to the survival, development, and protection of children are central during negotiations on the SDGs, and to the discussion on financing for development.
In July, the international community will agree on the financing strategies to attain the SDGs, and investing in children is essential for these. We encourage the Government of Canada to work to introduce and support strong language on investing in children into the Addis Ababa outcome document, because investing in the early years of a child's life in child nutrition, in cognitive development, in child protection, yields long-term benefits for the individual and for society.
Adequate and equitable investments in children are a precondition for sustained economic growth. Unequal opportunities for children and persistently high levels of malnutrition, child mortality, and child poverty impose large burdens on the future growth potential of our societies. Investing in children is the prerequisite for the eradication of extreme poverty and ending poverty in all forms, so that the devastating cycle of intergenerational poverty can be broken.
Private and innovative sources of finance will be of increasing importance in financing the new SDG framework, and we welcome Canada’s leadership in promoting innovative ways to finance development. But official development assistance remains critically important for countries that have limited capacity to raise public resources domestically, as does halting the decline of ODA to the world's poorest countries. Official development assistance and concessional finance should be targeted at those countries with the greatest needs, and an increased amount of ODA allocated for spending on children.
In closing, I want you to know that Canada's investment in children is paying off. In fact, we're in the middle of a child survival revolution that's happening around the world. Fewer children are dying before the age of five than ever before in human history. Fewer children are not going to school than ever before in human history. More people have access to clean water than ever before in human history.
This is the child survival revolution, and it doesn't look like it in this room, but we are in fact all revolutionaries and part of making this global change. This is a foundation for the future.
Now we need to take the next steps. We need to be sure that children have birth certificates, that they have quality secondary schooling, that they have strong laws to protect them from exploitation and abuse, so that all of these children—our children in the world—will not only survive, but thrive in peace and prosperity in the years ahead.
Thank you.