Most kids are without basic services: Survey

Experts say the country's children are still being "left behind", even though conditions are improving slightly.

Millions of children don't have access to clean water and proper toilet facilities and go to bed hungry, a report released last week showed.

The report, calledSA Child Gauge 2010/2011 and released by the University of Cape Town's Children's Institute, showed that more than a third of children in the country lived in households without access to clean drinking water on site in 2009.

This is slightly worse than the 2008 figures from the previous Child Gauge report.

Senior policy specialist at Unicef SA - a UN children's rights organisation - Andre Viviers said the report showed a "significant number of children are being left behind".

He said children in poor, rural areas suffer the most as their rights to access clean water, health care and sanitation are the least likely to be realised.

"Children are walking a fragile road to adulthood," he said.

The report also showed that almost 3million of the country's 18.6million children (15.7%) went to bed hungry in 2009.

The Eastern Cape and the Free State were the provinces with the highest child hunger rates.

In 2008, 3.3million of the country's 18.8million children lived in households where child hunger was reported.

The institute's senior researcher Katharine Hall said it's "unacceptable that so many children grow up in conditions of extreme deprivation". She said: "A whole generation of children have grown up since [the dawn of] democracy, yet high levels of deprivation and inequality have persisted."

The report also shows that the country has "very high rates of child poverty" - almost two-thirds of children (61%) were living in households with a per capita income below R552 per month in 2009 - almost 80% of children in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape lived below the poverty line.

The figures, based on Stats SA's General Household Survey, showed:

• More than 2million children (10.9%) lived in back-yard dwellings or shacks in informal settlements in 2009 - a decline from 2008's figure of almost 2.3million; and
• More than a third (6.8 million) of children didn't have access to proper toilet facilities in 2009 and used pit latrines, buckets or open land. In 2008 the figure stood at more than 7million.

Viviers said the organisation is "concerned" about the figures.

"Whether a child lives in a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal or in an affluent suburb in Johannesburg, you need to have the same access to clean water and sanitation."

Hall said children are extremely vulnerable to the effects of poverty, and that policies to address child poverty are often good, but are poorly implemented.

"In the areas of education and public health services much of the physical infrastructure is there . but the service is not," she said.