The COVID-19 pandemic has caused alarming levels of hunger and poverty amongst Zimbabwean children, forcing many of them to sell their bodies in order to buy food.
The data that UNICEF together with the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency published at the end of 2020 is distressing as it reveals that 76.3% of children in rural areas live in abject poverty and half of those do not have sufficient food. Humanitarian aid organizations have warned that if nothing is done to avert child poverty, the crisis will only worsen.
This led to girls leaving school and taking to the streets to provide sexual services especially in mining towns and cities as capital Harare. Their clients are minors who prefer to use the services of young girls as they believe that they are less likely to have sexually transmitted diseases. Unfortunately, however, data confirm that child prostitution spreads AIDS and the disease affects younger and younger sections of the population. UNAIDS estimates that in 2018 a third of all new HIV cases were found in the population aged between 15 and 24, with 9,000 new cases being amongst young women and 4,200 among young men.
Although child prostitution in Zimbabwe is a crime, it is rarely detected by authorities and it is difficult to measure exactly the extent of it. Nevertheless, as the country is hit by hunger increasingly worse, one can easily see the problem expanding on Zimbabwean streets.
The situation was made even worse by the severe droughts that occurred at the beginning of last year which were assessed as being the most serious in the country’s history. They led to about 5.5 million people in rural Zimbabwe being on the brink of starvation and the COVID-19 pandemic that followed then caused a decrease in household incomes by as much as 50%. The pandemic combined with the droughts has resulted in high stunting rates as well as maternal and child mortality.
UN data from April 2020 indicated that about 4.3 million people were experiencing starvation. Matabeleland, in the southwestern part of the country, is the area with the highest global rate of acute malnutrition, UNICEF reported. The rate of children benefiting from the minimum acceptable diet necessary for growth and development fell from 6.9% in 2019 to 2.1% in 2020, according to a report by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee. Only 19% of Zimbabwean women of childbearing age could afford a diet that met the minimum nutritional requirements last year, while in 2019 this figure was 43%, the same report revealed.
UN agencies have been taking efforts to address this issue, but have been facing a lack of funds which is hampering their efforts.
