When children go hungry

Few things are sadder than the sight of a hungry child. My sadness turned to anger when I learned that corrupt adults were stealing food from the mouths of children in my own country. Most of you have seen the pictures of kindergarten pupils in Surat Thani being served nothing more than fermented rice noodles and fish sauce for their free school lunch. This was no one-off aberration but systematic looting of school budgets by so-called public servants. Who knows what long-term damage the nutritionally deprived children might suffer?

Initial investigations have uncovered falsified documents for school meals, failure to check ingredients on delivery, a lack of receipts identifying suppliers, and suspicious procurements such as weekly purchases of cooking gas. The gas obviously wasn’t being used to cook school meals, so where did it go?

These poor children, apart from a good education, deserve quality meals at school so that they can grow up healthy and make a contribution to society.

This case reminded me about a recent report that showed Thailand needs to do a better job of caring for its young people. A study by Save the Children ranked the country 85th out of 175 on a list of the best countries for children to grow up in. Its End of Childhood report places Singapore first, while Thailand is behind a number of African countries and even North Korea (70th).

Singapore performs well across the eight indicators: under-five mortality rate, child stunting, out-of-school children and youth, child labour, child marriage, adolescent birth rate, population displaced by conflict, and child homicide rate. The city-state, tied with Slovenia, scored 987 out of a possible 1,000, indicating that “relatively few children” miss out on childhood there.

“Singapore is a great place for children to grow up with good access to high-quality education and medical care services, while also being one of the safest countries in the world,” said Hassan Noor Saadi, Asia regional director for Save the Children. “Threats to childhood that plague other countries — like early marriage, poor access to education, and war — simply don’t exist in Singapore, or at extremely low levels.”

Compared with last year, 16 out of 21 countries in East Asia and the Pacific made progress. China’s score improved from 928 to 939, mostly due to improving enrollment rates and nutritional status of children, and Thailand gained 11 points to 863, due primarily to improved nutrition.

But the report also has some disturbing findings. Children from the poorest households are, on average, twice as likely to die before age five as those from the richest households. Save the Children identified some of the greatest survival gaps in East Asia, where the poorest children are three to 10 times as likely to die before age five as their wealthiest peers. Large disparities are present in Mongolia, Thailand and Vietnam — all of which have reached the UN Sustainable Development Goals target of 25 or fewer deaths per 1,000 live births.

Save the Children called on governments to “ensure that no child dies from preventable or treatable causes or is subjected to extreme violence; is robbed of a future as a result of malnutrition, early or forced marriage, early pregnancy, or forced labour; and that they have access to a quality education”.

In Thailand, quality education should include a quality meal for every child. But as we have seen in recent months, corruption appears endemic in our country and getting worse. Most disturbing are the cases in which public servants stole money from some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society — the elderly, the sick, at-risk girls — by skimming funds from welfare budgets.

Perhaps strong law enforcement in Singapore is one of the reasons the city-state is the best country in the world for children to grow up in, because there is less chance for corruption to happen there.

The education system has long had a bureaucratic relationship with its users, as opposed to a culture of openness and transparency. The scarcity of information and its inaccessibility to the general public produce opportunities for corruption, as they prevent any social control.

Changes that could reduce corruption, such as decentralised management of educational resources and promotion of schoolbased management, are still a distant dream in Thailand, where the top-down, Bangkok-centred Education Ministry remains resistant to reform of any kind.

The case of the hungry Surat Thani kindergarten kids should be a wake-up call to spur broader-based reform. We live in hope.