Upholding the rights of every Bangsamoro child
UNICEF Philippines Chief of Advocacy and Communication Lely Djuhari meets children and families in Bangsamoro region
Cotabato City, 27 March 2024 [updated 22 April 2024] – On 24-30 April 2024 World Immunization Week, will you join us to get vaccines #ForEveryChild?
As I embarked on my first visit to Cotabato and surrounding area during the first week of Ramadhan and in the first month of UNICEF’s new five-year country programme for children, I felt a palpable sense of excitement to meet children and young people in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
This excitement blended with a sense of awe towards my Mindanao field office colleagues, our government and civil society partners, as these champions for children face enormous challenges with gritty determination.
I flew from Manila for the three-day trip with another member of the Advocacy and Communication team, Gillian Salvador. Upon arrival, we had a security briefing: 10 years after the March 2014 signing of the comprehensive peace agreement, which led to the creation of the autonomous region, has resulted in a relatively stable peace. However, grave child rights violations, including the killing and maiming of children, continue. Armed clashes, some because of clan rivalry or known locally as rido, still occur.
Despite promising progress, hundreds of thousands of children here are still among the poorest and deprived of many rights. They stand behind other children in the Philippines in health, nutrition, education, and protection.
The challenge is felt every day. Every hour.
One daunting task is to stop the alarming spread of the highly infectious measles. The regional Health Ministry has recorded 630 cases in the first quarter of 2024. The last three months of 2023 saw 5,000 measles cases in the Western Pacific, of which half originated from the Philippines. Of those cases, the majority were from Lanao del Sur and Marawi City. Unless the region’s 18 per cent of fully immunized children increases drastically, deadly outbreaks like this will continue. Will you support us in our fight to change this?
Dr. Noriza Nor, the Maguindanao Provincial National Immunization Programme Coordinator, is aware of the dangers of not immunizing children in time. “We thought we contained the outbreak, but [recently] we decided that we needed (extra) support. We are running against the clock,” she said.
One good development she showed me was a well-functioning walk-in cold room and freezers, solar-powered refrigerators, power generators, temperature monitoring devices, spare parts, and thermal jackets donated last year by the Government of Japan through UNICEF.
But reaching every child here with life-saving vaccines is a formidable hurdle. Many live in hard-to-reach mountainous areas with dense forests, swamps and no roads. Many live on remote islands. Some parts of the government are still beset by inefficiencies in their public health emergency response. The supply chain management is still weak, qualified human resources are uneven. Few parents are worried if their children get fevers after a measles shot, although this is usually resolved after trusted sources reassure the families that vaccines work.
In the early years of her 18 years of service, Dr. Nor had one assistant. Now she has 508 midwives, 300 community nurses and 34 barangay (village) health workers but it’s still not enough. Huge distances between the communities to health facilities means that it’s hard for families to go to their health clinic. Front-line health workers and volunteers need to go door-to-door to immunize every child.
Other numbers are staggering.
Some 44 per cent of children are living in poverty – the highest in the country. A third of over 150,000 people still displaced due to conflict are children belonging to indigenous groups. Around 90 per cent of 3-4 years old children are not in early childhood education.
Almost 50 per cent children are too short for their age (stunted), an irreversible outcome of inadequate nutrition and repeated infection during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. Ten per cent of children are too thin (wasted) for their age, the most dangerous form of malnutrition.
It is the Bangsamoro leaders, among other stakeholders, who are critical to driving change for children. The region is gearing up for next year’s parliamentary elections to replace the current transitional authority. Mr. Ameen Andrew Alonto, Executive Director of the Bangsamoro Information Office, said he would be open to collaborating with UNICEF and partners to engage with government officials and legislators. Their role is key in advancing the progress of a draft Bangsamoro Children’s Code, which has robust and deeply considered provisions on child rights. Their roles in policymaking and budget oversight are also key in the fight to leave no child behind.
That endeavour starts in the early years.
I visited Lu Shin Khan Day Care, where UNICEF is considering to include the barangay as part of a model village for good practices, especially for early learning. There I met fathers, mothers, children, and their teacher.
Parida Kiao Tuankali, a child development worker, who has been working at the center for the past two years, told me: “[We have couples] who are very committed parents. They have agreed that it’s not only the mothers who need to take care of their children’s education, but also the father. All their children graduated here because they see the benefits of early learning for their children’s future.”
From the early years, we moved on to the next decade of life.
A group of children and young advocates fighting for climate action, prevention of child sexual abuse and exploitation, inclusion of out-of-school children and promoting peacebuilding spoke to me at a gathering of “the pain” they felt seeing the injustice their everyday lives. But they also told me of their hopes.
Frank Maslee Saludes, 15, a child representative at the Local Council for the Protection of Children, said he was an “accidental leader” as his friends cajoled him to run for an election to speak up on their behalf at the Council.
“It is a dream come true for me to be given the space to put (to our leaders] our concerns and what we experience. We want to do more,” he said.
The children’s words are the spur I need to wake up every morning feeling energized and ready to work. It makes me want to fight harder. It makes me want to gather as many allies as we can to protect existing achievements and do more to get leaders in the region to commit politically and financially to our promises to children: Together we can ensure no child gets sick of vaccine-preventable diseases . Together we do the hard work and realize children’s right to survive, thrive, be protected and participate in decisions that matter to them. Together, we will never leave the children in Bangsamoro region behind.
All data cited in this article are from the Philippines official statistics or analysis by UNICEF Philippines.
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