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Street Children (Congo)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr. Brown) on securing this debate and above all on the impressive way in which he set out the nature of this terrible problem. I thank members of the all-party groups on street children and on the great lakes region and genocide prevention, which, with organisations that have been referred to in the debate—Human Rights Watch, War Child, Save the Children and Amnesty International—have produced a series of thoughtful reports that help all of us to keep up the pressure on the Congolese authorities. I am grateful for the contributions from the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), my hon. Friends the Members for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) and for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), and the hon. Members for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) and for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds). My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North said that it is a pity we cannot have pictures to look at, but every speech that we have heard has painted a painful picture of what life is like for street children, who are at the forefront of our minds this morning. What we have heard tells us that the DRC at the moment is one of the worst places in which to be born and to grow up. One third of children under the age of five are underweight; less than half of children of primary school age are in school and the number has declined considerably in recent years. Only one in three have access to decent sanitation, and as we heard this morning, tens of thousands of children face appalling dangers and threats in their daily lives, having been abandoned to the streets by their own parents, subjected to extraordinary abuse by so-called churches, persecuted by the police, manipulated by political parties, subjected to sexual violence or enslaved by armed groups. Every single one of those children is vulnerable—all of them. Those children who are not in school and the street children are vulnerable. For a society to put its next generation through so much shows just how much the fabric of Congolese society has been destroyed by war, conflict and misrule. My hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway made that point eloquently. There is hope for all people in Congo through the political process. I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley well in her further observation of the elections. She made the point that the world has witnessed in the DRC the first opportunity for a generation to use democracy to change people’s lives. Britain rightly played an important part in helping to fund those elections. In 11 days’ time, the second round of the presidential elections takes place. Several hon. Members made the point that there is a heavy responsibility on the two candidates to accept the results, whoever wins. The hon. Member for Richmond Park made that point forcefully this morning, and I made it to the candidates when I was in Kinshasa at the beginning of September. They must also reach out to others, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, because if one candidate thinks that they can take all the power and exclude the rest of the people, there will be a risk of Congo returning to the war and violence that has destroyed the country. There is a long way to go, and I agree with the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness that the elections are the start of the process. It will be slow, painful and difficult, but at the heart of the issues that we have discussed today is the need for governance. What we have heard described this morning is the result of a failure of governance. That is the fundamental problem in the DRC, and for that reason the international community must stay there for a long time. That is why we have a large and growing programme, which was worth £5.6 million in 2001 and will be worth £62 million this year. We did not have a bilateral programme in the DRC 15 years ago. It was not part of Anglophone Africa, but we are there now because the country has its best chance of hope in a generation. How are we contributing in order to improve the lives of street children? The British embassy is supporting a Congolese NGO to reunite street children with their families in Kinshasa and to educate parents against abandoning their children in the first place. Our HIV programme focuses on orphans and vulnerable children. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), we are already discussing with the World Bank a major education programme to reduce school fees in the DRC. With the World Bank, we will ensure that the programme addresses the needs of the most vulnerable, including street children, because removing school fees is probably the most important step that we can take to give children, and their parents if they have them, the chance to get into education. Street children will not get the education that they deserve unless there is a reduction in fees.