Millennium Development Goals

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, that very powerful speech leads into my contribution as chair of the All-Party Group on Street Children, which received a powerful presentation in July on Protect for the future: Placing children’s protection and care at the heart of achieving the MDGs. That piece of research was produced with the help of Save the Children, Railway Children, the International Children’s Trust, Retrak, the Consortium for Street Children, ChildHope and War Child.

If the millennium development goals are about children’s futures, there is still quite some work to do in putting protecting children at the heart of those goals. Let me give just a couple of examples of very practical things that should be done to help children. I refer in particular to street children, especially those who lose their homes as a result of conflict—although that is an extreme example—or as a result perhaps of family violence or of migration to escape rural poverty. In any event, the effects on the children are often very similar.

One of the greatest effects is lack of access to education. If a child does not have an address, it is very hard for the child to go to school. If the child cannot buy a uniform and the school requires a uniform, it is very hard for the child to go to school. Even the lack of a birth certificate can have a crucial effect on a child’s future chances in life, as that can make it hard to migrate across borders or possibly to get any sort of job. The need to ensure registration of all children at birth, so that they have a document, might sound bureaucratic, but it is actually a great necessity.

A few schemes offer a perverse incentive, such as those that offer money for the fostering of children. The report found that, in some cases, children were put into foster care so that the money could be accessed. Such perverse incentives need to be guarded against.

All those issues, particularly protecting children, apply in spades to girl street children, who are more vulnerable, more at risk and more subject to the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, and my noble friend Lady Tonge raised about sexual health. Before these children even reach adulthood, they are pregnant. I am sorry to say that in a lot of cases well meaning NGOs run by the church prevent contraception from being given to those girl street children.