AfricaPress-Tanzania: NATIONAL Assembly Speaker Job Ndugai has asked Members of Parliament (MPs) to speak about challenges facing children while in Parliament and find better ways to address them.
He said this at the weekend during the occasion of marking World Children’s Day organised by Unicef at the National Assembly precincts and attended by MPs.
Mr Ndugai said MPs should advocate Tanzanian children’s rights and speak on their challenges so that relevant authorities could take appropriate steps to address them.
“They are the future voters, let us ensure all challenges facing them are addressed, especially women parliamentarians should be in the frontline in this as they know better their situations than we men,” said Mr Ndugai
He said the National Assembly had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (Mou) with Unicef, which among other things, would be training legislators who the majority of them were new to advocate the children’s rights and welfare.
Mr Ndugai said it was high time parliamentarians brought issues that advocated the children’s development agenda and come up with recommendations on how best the government should handle them.
Earlier, Unicef Country Representative Shalini Bahuguna commended the government for taking a number of initiatives to address children’s issues, suggesting more focus on universal health coverage, water access, sanitation and education.
She said the government had taken a number of measures, including amending and enacting laws that aligned with the Convention on the Rights of the Child which was the world’s most ratified convention.
Ms Bahuguna named the areas with excellent performance on children issues as the Free Education Policy and a decrease in under five children mortality. However, she urged for more focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) so that they got reflected in the National Development Plan as the country had attained the lower middle-income economy status.
For his part, UN Resident Coordinator Ambassador Zlatan Milisic said this year’s celebrations under the theme “Reimagine a better future for every child” called for government support for children’s rights.
He said the number of children was growing fast, thus rethinking and creating an enabling environment for them to prosper with skills, knowledge and competence was something that must be well-attended.
“If we fail to invest in a child, we will fail to establish socioeconomic development to children, thus national plans, budget and policy needs must be formulated to meet children’s needs,” he insisted
