|
Child Sponsor Sierra Leone
Today Sierra Leone is perhaps best known for one of the most savage and cruel civil wars in the history of mankind. Infrastructure, including thousands of schools, had became just piles of rubble and the nation was emotionally scarred for generations not least the country's children, thousands of whom had been enforced under pain of death to become child soldiers. Thousands more became orphans and for many their lives are still traumatised. Today Sierra Leone is in 184th place out of 191 countries and territories in 2021 when ranked in terms of life expectancy, literacy, access to knowledge and the living standards of a country with a life expectancy of 60.06 years (2021). According the World Bank, 44.2% of the popluation live in poverty ranging from 60% in rural areas to 20% in urban and there is a child mortality rate (under fives) of 109.2 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2019.
|
|
|
According to UNICEF, nearly half of a million of children under the age of five are stunted while 30,000 are suffering from malnutrition. In 2022, adult literacy rate for Sierra Leone was 48.64%. Child sponsor programs in Sierra Leone work with orphaned, disabled and abandoned children, access to health, nutrition and AIDS awareness programs, education access projects and vocational training for teenagers as well as counselling services. Other work is undertaken with poor children who are most at risk of trafficking when their families simply give them away either because they can't afford to care for them or in exchange for false promises of a better life for the child. Many of these children end up in forced manual labour, domestic servitude or, for girls, worse. You can help when you sponsor a child in Sierra Leone.
|
