Myanmar Situational Analysis
Children without parental care
The principal issue affecting the care and development of children in Myanmar is the exceedingly high percentage of orphans. Around 8% of children aged 0–17 years in Myanmar are not living with their biological parents.
The overall prevalence is certainly higher, considering this data does not include those living on the street (estimates range from between 3 and 5 percent of children live on the street). Parental death is not the main reason for children being without parental care: Two thirds of those in orphanages have one or both parents alive, most orphaned children have been abandoned by their parents as a result of economic pressures.
Adoption rates are low, leaving many children under the care of various types of institutions.
Exploitation of children
The labor force participation of children aged 10–14 years is 18%; Despite legal restrictions, commercial sex of women is available in Myanmar. Children exploited for commercial sex are most often girls, but there are also some boys. Children (orphaned girls primarily) form a considerable proportion of trafficked persons both within and outside Myanmar.
Most international trafficking of Myanmar women and girls to China is for forced marriage; other common reasons for trafficking of women and children are for labor purposes (domestic work, factories, fishing industry, begging, and street vending) and commercial sex work.
Health care system
Myanmar’s health care system continues to grapple with significant problems in terms of access, quality, human resources, management and organization. The levels of public expenditure on health services are very low, and inefficiencies in the health system mean that what little is spent does not achieve maximum results. Many health facilities lack basic equipment and supplies and do not have sufficient and/ or appropriate health staff.
The health assistant to population ratio in Myanmar is 1:21,822. Each year, around 56,000 children under five die in Myanmar – 43,000 of them younger than 1 month. The country’s under-5 and infant mortality rates are the highest in Asia and many of these deaths are preventable.
Access to clean water
Only around one third of households have their water source on their premises; the rest have to fetch water. The most common water sources used are tube wells or bore holes, followed by protected dug wells.
A water-quality assessment found that most of the dug wells – protected or not – contained water contaminated with faecal coliform and arsenic. Only around 33% of households use an appropriate water treatment method to make their water safe to drink.
Almost 25% of households used unsanitary ways of excreta disposal
Use of improved latrines is much higher in urban and richer households compared with rural and poorer households. However many latrines designated as ‘improved’ by households are in fact unhygienic; even where genuinely improved, poor maintenance means they may be only partially or not functional at all.
Access at home does not mean universal access. Many schools have latrine facilities but their condition is often poor, leaving many of them unsanitary or even unusable for school children.
The Orphan Problem
A simple way to understand the extend of the orphan problem in Myanmar would be to take the homeless population in America (700,000) and multiply it by 13; this would give you the same percentage of homeless in America as the percentage of orphans in Myanmar (3% of the population). We struggle with the existing homeless problem, try to imagine how severe it would be if it were multiplied 13 times.
Myanmar’s solution to the problem has been to disenfranchise them. Without proof of one’s individual’s parents citizenship, you are not recognized as a citizen of the country, thus since orphans can not prove their parents were citizens of Myanmar, they do not officially exist (In fairness, the orphans are collateral damage from a constitutional provision that is designed to block the Muslim Rohingyas’ from obtaining citizenship).
Most orphans have one or both parents alive, however due to the extreme poverty they face many parents believe that they and their children will be better off if they are left for someone else to raise. As such, most orphans in Myanmar are children who have simply been abandoned.
Once abandoned there are three possibilities for the children:
1. Someone finds them and takes them to a Buddhist monastery where they are raised to be monks.
2. Someone finds them and takes them to a Christian orphanage, these overcrowded orphanages struggle to provide substandard housing, rudimentary food and clothing.
3. Someone finds them and they fall prey to human trafficking, using them for child labor or exploit them sexually.
Education System
Myanmar’s education system only manages to get 1 in 4 students to the final year of high school, a much higher percentage of orphans never reach that point. If they do make it to the final year, then to earn their degree they must take and pass an exam that is partly administered in English.
The difference between passing the exam and not is life-changing; if you pass it you may be able to go to college, or at least get a job that will pay in the range of $300 to $400 a month. If not your best options are as a menial laborer earning between $30 and $45 a month. Currently, only 29% of those who take the exam, pass the exam (or 7.5% of the children who are eligible to take it) To date, we have had 15 of our students pass the exam.
Primary education: The majority of primary school-aged children (5–9 years) in Myanmar are attending school. However, the enrollment of orphaned and disabled children is particularly low. Children are expected to enroll in primary school at the age of 5, but late enrollment is common, leading to many over-aged children in primary education. The net completion rate for primary school is only 54.2%.
Secondary education: Only 58.3% of secondary school age are attending secondary school – the remainder were either out of school or still attending primary school. The socio-economic status difference in attendance is far more pronounced for secondary than primary schools, with 31.2% of the poor and orphaned secondary age children attending school. An overwhelming majority of children fail to complete a basic education (primary and secondary) as defined by the Government of Myanmar.
Up to 80% of all orphans fail to get a basic education (one defined as getting thru secondary school) With no hope, no education, no vocational skills, when they age out of the orphanage they end up doing menial labor, are criminals or fall prey to human trafficking. Current estimates are that 7 out of 10 orphan girls will eventually become victims of human trafficking.