afrol News, 4 November - Guinea has become a haven for thousands of children fleeing the region's wars, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said today. The large number of child refugees, adding to one million adult refugees in Guinea, also jeopardises the country's economic development.

Speaking from New York, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy today said that border monitors and non-governmental organisations are reporting that many children - very often separated from their families - are seeking shelter in Guinea.

According to UNICEF, more than a million refugees from the neighbouring countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire have fled wars and travelled to Guinea in the last decade, severely straining the country's resources.

Of these refugees, over 100,000 people are living in Guinean refugee camps, and a recent survey estimated that another 50,000 mainly young are living on the streets of the major cities.

Ms Bellamy said many of the refugees are children, and the problem has been exacerbated by the return of Guinean youngsters from Liberia, where they had been serving as child soldiers in the Liberian civil war.

- This is a snapshot of all of West Africa's wars over the past decade, said Ms Bellamy. "Children fleeing recruitment, violence, and exploitation; criss-crossing borders; beginning as unaccompanied children in one place, becoming child soldiers in another, and refugee minors in a third. And perhaps returning again to soldiering if they can’t find the means to subsist, or if they are simply rejected by their families."

She said UNICEF has reunited many refugee children with their families, and is also trying to demobilise 2,000 Guinean child soldiers, of whom as many as one-fifth are thought to be girls.

- But a shortage of funding threatens to leave those halfway through the reintegration process high and dry, and the others without any prospect of support, UNICEF reports. So far Guinea has attracted only a quarter of the funds needed to run its programmes.

By staff writer

© afrol News

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