‘Up to 500,000 child soldiers worldwide’

GENEVA: There are up to 500,000 child soldiers around the world, Nobel laureate and child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi said on Friday, terming it the worst form of child abuse.
Satyarthi, who is attending an International Labour Organisation summit in Geneva, said global funding for education — the best means to fight child labour and servitude — had gone down dramatically over the past four years.
“There are between 400,000 and 500,000 child soldiers across the world but the actual numbers could be far higher because there are hidden militant groups kidnapping children and forcing them to use guns,” he told reporters.
Satyarthi, whose decades-long campaign to end child labour in his native India and elsewhere won him the Nobel Peace prize last year, said “making children kill people is the worst thing you can do to a child.”
“Look at what´s happening in Syria, in Iraq, Nigeria and in Afghanistan,” he said.
“When I read that a five-year-old child is given a gun to kill an opponent of a militia group in Iraq... and the child could not handle that gun, he was buried alive... That makes me angry. I think this should make you all angry,” he told the summit on Thursday.
Satyarthi said that global funding for education had plummeted in recent years “partly due to the financial crisis and partly due to donors´ perceptions that education had made huge strides in developing countries when the case is not actually so.”