Life for most of the world’s children has improved over the last decade but Africa is bucking that trend and conflicts are putting more young people at risk, the head of UNICEF said on Thursday.

In post-war Afghanistan, many more children were able to go to school after the end of Taliban rule, UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said, but Iraq’s children faced a mixed picture after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

“For the majority of the world’s children things are better over the last 10 years,” she told Reuters on her last tour of Africa after a decade as head of the U.N. children’s fund.

“Child mortality has improved except in sub Saharan Africa where it has gone backwards and some are suffering a triple whammy - poverty, HIV/AIDS and war.”

Despite most children benefiting from a wealthier globe, some 10 million still died worldwide each year of preventable causes, she said. The changing face of warfare - with 55 of the 59 wars since 1990 confined within the borders of one country - also made matters worse, she said.

“Military people are not bearing the brunt of warfare - it’s children and civilians,” she said. “The trend in conflict - the impact of war on civilians, children, use of land mines, girls being used as sex slaves - this is a trend that is getting worse.”

Conflicts in Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and the Central African Republic as well as in Colombia, Sri Lanka and the Caucasus were all having a devastating impact on children but risked being ignored, said Bellamy, who leaves her current post in June.

“Look at northern Uganda where 30,000 children have to be locked behind gates every night to avoid being abducted to become child soldiers,” she said.

DAMAGED IRAQI SCHOOLS

Even countries such as Angola and Sierra Leone that have recently seen the end of protracted wars - including widespread use of child soldiers - should be watched in case they slipped back, Bellamy said.

In Iraq, children had already been weakened by years of sanctions and war even before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, she said, and since then difficult working conditions made it harder to say if things were better or worse, with schools damaged and overcrowded, lacking supplies and sanitation.

“There are more children in school in Iraq this year than there were last year but the conditions of the schools are just horrific,” she said. “They are worse than they were before the war but they were not good then. It’s not only the fault of this war.”

Immunisation numbers were being kept up but access to water was a problem in a country where one in eight children died before the age of five even before the current conflict.

But in Afghanistan, invaded by U.S.-led forces in 2001, conditions for children had improved since the end of Taliban rule, she said, with four million children in school - including girls banned from education under the previous regime.

The health system remained weak but was an improvement on three or four years earlier, she said, but some children were being forced to work in Afghanistan’s opium fields, which have massively boosted production since 2001.