16-01 The Issues

Naturally children are our future. And in trying to examine this future, it is smart to determine where children are born and the degree to which they are being educated.
So, let’s be a little simplistic and assume a billion children are born in China and India. And during this same hypothetical period assume 250 million are born in Europe and North America.
Now about 5% of any population has children with the intellectual ability and discipline to acquire a university education. This means 50 million children in China and India will be potential leaders in business, government or public life compared to roughly 12.5 million in Europe and North America.
Now you have one way of examining the future in terms of children and their impact on the future economic power and influence of nations.
No point lamenting the state of poverty in so many parts of the world unless you have a solution to deal with the state of their children. Apparently, there are about 100 million children in the world who do not receive any education. No future for them or their communities.
My mother’s mother was one of those unfortunate children, but this was back in the late 1800s. She was part of a family of eight children and only the boys were given schooling.
But unlike the child in the photo, she was not the product of extreme poverty. Nor was she sold into slavery. She did tell me that she was always hungry and never had shoes.
And she worked in the family upholstery business at the age of five. Despite their efforts, the family barely earned enough to feed themselves. They lived in Romania and emigrated to England at the turn of the century.
Some families have the ability and wits to do something about their situation.
It was in the Philippines in 1975 and taking a walk near our hotel when I was propositioned by a girl of 14. It was my first experience with child prostitution and it was one of the most shocking experiences of my life.
The issue of children and their lives became real for me for the first time. I was with a member of the Board of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and we bought the girl a meal. Her first of the day.
She was not part of an organized ring but sent into prostitution by her mother to earn enough to help feed her other two children. The father was a communist fighting in the hills.
It takes an emotional experience to force you to come to grips with an issue. What is so frustrating when you want to confront an issue associated with children is the feeling that these issues are all so overwhelming.
Especially if you have been raised in a family that has never known poverty and cherishes its children. Being blessed makes it hard to understand the lives of others.
How about child labour. Most consumers would avoid buying clothes if they knew that they were being produced in nations that exploit child labour.
Unfortunately, it is not hard to disguise where things are made in todays world. Something made in country A is then sold to country B and then sold to country C and on and on it goes.
Statistics point to something like 200 million children between the ages of 5 and 16 that are forced to work for a living. And families in poverty often sell their children into a form of slave labour. The photo shows what child labour looks like.
My father met a waitress in Nassau and discovered she had three young girls that were fathered by three different men. And she worked her heart out to look after her children. They lived in welfare housing with windows in her two-room home without glass. But, she considered herself fortunate. So, some societies have welfare solutions to cope with poverty and children.
Here is another nasty number. Something like 25,000 children die each day that are underweight and stunted in their growth. It’s the ugly side of poverty.
The issue of children in the world is a combination of both economics and emotion. The emotion is more powerful than the economics if you have had children of your own.
That’s the way I see it anyways.