Set me free
Sue Shaw discovers hope for poor children on a journey through Nairobi's slums.

Children for sale
Would you buy a baby in order to save its life? Harry Philips reports on a couple who made a bigger commitment to Third World children than sending them monthly sponsorship cheques.

Pretty as a picture
The wide-eyed child, smiling or starving, is the most powerful fundraiser for aid agencies. Paddy Coulter explains why using this image does more harm than good.

Victims of rescue
Anthony Swift explodes the myth that we should rescue abused children - and reveals better ways to help.

'I'm not going to be a bum'
'Right now we're trying to organize a popsicle factory.' Judith Ress hears how Peru's street children have taken control of their lives.

HOW TO HELP THE CHILDREN - THE FACTS

Letters to a god
Child-sponsorship is booming. An international team of journalists expose the price that children pay.

Born to beg
Ibrahim Sajid describes something that Pakistani beggars and Western aid agencies have in common.

SIMPLY... Why you should not sponsor a child

The boycott is back
Nestlé is in the dock again. Peter Cox finds out why.

ACTION

No real problem finding photos for this issue of NI, I thought when I embarked on this magazine. But I was wrong.

Of course images of passive children abound - pictures of toddlers being bathed or carried; children gazing wide-eyed into the camera; youngsters clinging to their parent's hands. But I did not want these. I wanted the magazine to be about helping children - about giving them confidence and control over their lives, not making them dependent. I trekked around the different photo-agencies and spent hours flicking through their files.

Eventually I found what I was looking for, but it wasn't easy. Photos reveal a lot about our cultural attitudes: the images I saw confirmed what I had suspected. We may love children, desire them, pity them or ignore them - but we don't often listen to what they say - still less act on it.

Yet we have plenty of reason to admire children. Wrote Aldous Huxley: 'Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, and the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision'.

In the Third World especially, children survive situations that would probably defeat you or I. They endure beatings, starvation and exploitation. They live in abject poverty - often on the streets. They deserve our respect.

Respect for children underpins the Declaration of the Rights of the Child drawn up 30 years ago. The Declaration consists of ten principles adopted by the United Nations General Assembly - a body which has no effective means of enforcing them. But today there is a flurry of activity to supplement the Declaration with a legally-binding document - the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Work on the Convention is almost finished and, if passed, it will be a landmark; for the first time ever there will be international agreement that children are human beings with their own civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

It should make us aware that as adults we have responsibilities for all the world's children. We should do everything we can to help them. And since most of us can only assist Third World children through aid agencies, this magazine looks at various projects and schemes on offer and suggests the best paths to take.

It has been a difficult issue to edit. There were few ready-made answers to the question of 'how do we help children?' Surprisingly little has been written on the subject - another reflection of how we undervalue the young. In the midst of this silence, the principles underlying Children's Rights stood out boldly. They gave the magazine its direction. I hope it is a thought-provoking route.

Letters
Letter from China
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Maria del Nevo
Reviews: including Agostinho Neto classic
Country profile: US Virgin Islands

COVER PHOTO: Bruno Barbey / Magnum
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER