According to the latest report of UNICEF, “Ten years of transition”, published in Geneva on 29 November, child poverty is very widespread in the former Soviet bloc countries of the Community of Independent States (CIS) and in both central and eastern Europe, in spite of the growth being registered by their economies. Families have difficulty in surviving and ever more children end up in public institutes or on adoption lists, so great is the poverty. The report notes that in the course of the last decade, the number of children in poor families has slightly increased while real incomes have dropped and the inequalities have grown. It is estimated that almost 18 million children and adolescents in the region are living in extreme poverty, on less than 2.15 $ per day, equivalent to 17% of this age group within the population. Most of these poor children 16 million – live in the CIS and another two million in central and eastern Europe. The report points out the growing disparity in the health-care situation between the more affluent and the poorer sections of the populations in the region. In the Ukraine, in Russia and in Armenia, one child out of seven suffers from malnutrition; but in Albania, in Uzbekistan and in Tadzhikistan, the proportion is even higher: one child in three. The UNICEF report reveals that adoptions and the placing of children in institutions often increase in tandem, thus contradicting those who predicted that the phenomenon of adoption would reduce the number of children in care. In Belorus for example, the adoption rate increased by 160% between 1989 and 1999, while the number of children aged from 0 to 3 placed in orphanages increased by 70%. In some countries, especially in Russia, the increase in international adoptions has developed concurrently with the decline in national adoptions.
