Growing numbers of teenage Madagascan girls, some as young as 12, are resorting to prostitution in the desperate hope of finding a rich husband to rescue them from poverty, a UN official said yesterday. Child protection workers on the giant Indian Ocean island are keen to highlight the extent of a problem more commonly associated with Asian countries like Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines.

The UN child protection agency UNICEF estimates that 30 to 50 percent of the country’s thousands of sex workers are under the age of 18, a greater percentage than in Cambodia. “The problem is huge,” UNICEF’s child protection officer for Madagascar, Valerie Tanton, told Reuters in an interview.

“It’s a larger proportion than Cambodia ... The majority of them are 15 to 16, but there are some as young as 12.” Aid workers say poverty has driven many into prostitution on the island off southeast Africa, where 75 percent of the population of about 17 million live on less than a dollar a day.

Economists say rising inflation, averaging 17 percent in the past year, has pushed even more people into hunger and destitution on the world’s fourth largest island, where most people eke out a living as subsistence farmers. Tanton said most young prostitutes started out hoping to marry a wealthy man but ended up simply offering sex to men in exchange for financial support.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 1.1 percent of the population is infected with AIDS, and says this percentage, while low compared with some countries in Africa, is on the rise. “Prostitution is not an organised business in Madagascar, like in Cambodia or Thailand,” Tanton said. “What you have is very poor families who encourage the girl to find a rich husband. So they go out to look for a man with money. That’s how it starts.”

Children’s rights groups say Madagascar is also one of the countries often visited by “sex tourists”, some of whom pick up child prostitutes, though not always wittingly. UNICEF says that up to 3 million children are involved in the sex tourism trade each year worldwide.

Madagascar’s government has spearheaded a nationwide publicity campaign against sex tourism, targeting foreign “clients”, while UNICEF plans to launch an educational radio drama on the island this month that will try to show young girls there are other ways of escaping poverty. “We want to tell them the reality is not always how they imagine. Often they don’t end up marrying a rich man. They get STDs, they get pregnant, some have abortions,” Tanton said.

<B>Tim Cocks</B>