A/HRC/13/32 multiplicity of women, from single parents, widows, wives of migrant workers to women migrant workers.23 33. Rural households continue to acquire land through inheritance laws that emanate from customary legal regimes currently premised on reaffirming women's unequal access to and control over land. Because land is mediated through husbands, fathers, brothers or sons, women's land rights are negotiated within unequal power relationships and are not assumed to be general entitlements. This underscores the importance of legal and cultural reform to restore the balance of power relationships within the family. 2. Women and access to education, employment and health care 34. Rural women have the world’s lowest levels of schooling and the highest rates of illiteracy in all developing regions; twice as many women suffer from malnutrition as men, and girls are twice as likely to die from malnutrition as boys. Numerous studies underscore the social costs of rural women’s lack of education and assets, linking them directly to high rates of malnutrition, infant mortality and, in some countries, HIV/AIDS infection. There are also high economic costs: wasted human capital and low labour productivity that stifle rural development and progress in agriculture, and ultimately threaten food security. Discrimination against women in the context of the right to adequate food is a culmination of all other aspects of discrimination that stifle women’s rights to equality and empowerment. E. Discrimination against children 1. Malnutrition and health care 35. In addition to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the CRC establishes the international protection and care framework for children. Seen in line with food, health and care as three conditions to achieve nutritional security, the Convention includes provisions that protect the right to nutrition. Reality remains nonetheless bleak. In 2008, 8.8 million children born across the world died before their fifth birthday.24 More than one third of child deaths worldwide are attributed to malnutrition. 36. Children’s food security is negatively affected in situations where more powerful individuals and groups hold disproportionate shares of resources and property. This is exacerbated by ineffective systems for the monitoring and sanctioning of property rights and sustainable resources by Governments, the pressures and incentives of privatization and kinship-based customary institutions, which lack effective mechanisms to back up the interest of weaker groups and individuals, particularly children. 2. Child labour 37. 158 million children, or one child in six, aged between 5 and 14 years, are involved in child labour. In sub-Saharan Africa this phenomenon concerns one child in three, compared to only one in 20 in the region of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Children living in the poorest households and rural areas are the most likely to be involved in child labour. An overwhelming majority of those burdened with household chores are girls. Although between 2002 and 2006, globally, child labour fell by 11 per cent, a number of factors have made agricultural child labour 23 24 10 FAO, Gender issues in land tenure, “High level consultation on rural women and information”, Rome, 4-6 October 1999 See www.childinfo.org/mortality.html.