CHILDREN’S HEALTH AND TOXIC CHEMICALS
An African Perspective
When we talk about protecting the environment, our conversations often focus on forests, rivers, wildlife, climate change, and pollution. These conversations are important, but often we tend to forget the people at the centre of the environmental crisis, the children, who have no control over the environment they are born into.
One thing that concerns me deeply is the fact that children often have the least responsibility for environmental problems but can carry their consequences for the longest time.
They do not get to decide whether the water in their community is safe or whether the air around their home is polluted, or where chemicals are being used close to where they live, learn and play. Yet these often have consequences on their health long before they are old enough to understand what is happening.
For this reason, children’s health and toxic chemicals should be treated as an environmental justice issue.
In my opinion, environmental justice is not only about protecting nature. It is also about asking who carries the greatest burden when the environment becomes unsafe, and who has the least power to prevent it.
Some environmental threats are easy to see. We can see plastic waste on the streets, smoke from a burning dump, or an oil spill in a water source. But chemicals can be different. Some of the most harmful exposures are invisible.
Children can come into contact with harmful substances through contaminated food and water, polluted air, pesticides, waste, household products, industrial activities, and contaminated soil. Sometimes the effects are immediate, but in other cases the consequences manifest years later.
This makes the issue particularly worrying because childhood is a period of rapid growth and development. A child is not simply a smaller version of an adult. Their bodies and organs are still developing, and their behaviour can also increase exposure. For instance, younger children often put their hands and objects into their mouths.
The question, therefore, should not only be how much chemical exposure is considered acceptable. We should be asking whether children should be exposed to preventable risks in the first place.
What does this mean for Africa? In many African communities, environmental concerns cannot be separated from poverty and access to basic services.
A family struggling to find safe water may have minimal choices. Farmers may depend on pesticides because they are trying to protect the little income they have. A community living near waste disposal sites may have limited influence over where those sites are located. Children growing up in these areas inherit risks that they didn’t create.
This is where environmental justice becomes real.
It is easy to discuss chemicals in conference rooms and international meetings. But the conversation must also reach the child drinking water from a water source that may be contaminated, the family living beside poorly managed waste, and the young person whose health is affected by pollution without ever being consulted about the decisions that created that risk.
Africa should not be expected to choose between development and the health of its children. Development should improve people’s lives, rather than create new environmental burdens for those who have the least power to resist them.
Children never created industrial pollution or decided how chemicals should be produced, transported or disposed of. Neither did they design systems that allow hazardous substances to enter communities. Yet they are the ones exposed to the consequences.
Protecting children from harmful chemicals is therefore not simply a technical issue for scientists or environmental regulators. It is also a question of rights, responsibility and fairness.
Children have a right to grow, learn and develop in surroundings that do not place their health at unnecessary risk.
The chemical conversation also needs to be connected to climate change.
Communities already facing droughts, floods, food insecurity and displacement can become even more vulnerable when pollution and chemical exposure are added to the picture. Climate related emergencies can damage water systems, disrupt waste management and expose communities to additional environmental hazards.
For children, these pressures can overlap.
A child affected by climate change may also be affected by unsafe water, poor sanitation, polluted air or hazardous waste. We therefore need approaches that recognise these issues as connected rather than treating each problem in isolation.
I believe that children and young people should not be discussed as vulnerable groups. They are people with ideas, experiences and solutions.
I believe meaningful participation matters, and it should not simply mean inviting young people to a conference, allowing them a few minutes to speak and then making decisions without them. It should mean creating opportunities for their experiences to influence policies and programmes that affect their lives.
Young people across Africa are already speaking about climate change, pollution, environmental health and justice. Their voices should be part of the decisions being made today because they are among those who will live longest with the consequences of those decisions. They should be decision makers too.
Governments have a responsibility to strengthen laws, monitoring and enforcement around hazardous chemicals and waste. Businesses also have a responsibility to prevent harm and to be transparent about the chemicals and processes they use.
But implementation is just as important as having policies on paper.
Communities need information they can understand. Parents and teachers need practical knowledge about environmental risks. Health workers need the capacity to recognise and respond to chemical exposure. Children and young people need safe spaces to raise concerns.
We also need better cooperation between environmental, health, education and child protection institutions because toxic chemical exposure does not belong to a particular sector alone.
The United Nations Environment Programme Global Framework on Chemicals provides an important opportunity to bring these different actors together and strengthen action on chemicals and waste. The framework should continue to place human health, environmental protection and the needs of vulnerable groups at the centre of implementation.
As we discuss chemicals at the international level, we should remember that people must be the basis for every policy.
There is a child somewhere who simply wants to go to school, play, drink water and grow up healthy. That child should not have to understand toxicology before being protected from toxic substances.
Environmental justice must therefore include the right of every child to a safe environment.
For Africa, this means ensuring that efforts to address chemicals and waste are connected to the realities of communities, particularly those facing poverty, climate vulnerability and limited access to basic services.
For the international community, it means recognising that protecting children from toxic exposure is not an optional environmental ambition. It is part of building a fairer and healthier future.
Children did not create the environmental risks around them. They should not have to carry the burden of those risks. Neither should families or communities.
A toxic future is not an unrealistic dream. It is a responsibility we have to the generation growing up now and to the generations that will come after them.
BY: ATIM EDITH LABEJA
ENVIRONMENTALIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER
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