A third of all children aged five to 15 live in poverty, the Foundation for Social Inclusion in Bosnia and the Initiative for Better and More Humane Inclusion wrote in the document titled "Towards the EU – Key Issues of Social Inclusion in Bosnia."

According to their research, 73.9 percent of children age five to 15 are deprived of one segment, while 22.8 were deprived of three or more segments of ordinary life. Almost a third of all children (30.6 percent) from this age group were living in poverty, meaning that more children live in poverty than grown-ups.

The extremely difficult social position of children in Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the primary causes of negative demographic processes in the country, said the document.

Children up to the age of four are mostly deprived of food (71.8 percent) and child development (65.7 percent), the authors wrote, adding that Romani and children with some disability are in a state of chronic multi-dimensional poverty which is the result of generational social exclusion, discrimination and inherited family poverty.

“It is estimated that 6.5 percent of children between two and nine years of age have some form of disability, and they are most marginalized and excluded in the society,” the document concluded.

This document was made and presented in Sarajevo, as part of the “Building an advocacy platform for social inclusion in Bosnia” project, which is supported by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).