In Liberia child survival is EVERYONE’s business
Thursday 5 August 2010
Over the past three months, Save the Children’s Liberia programme has been working more with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to promote the EVERY ONE campaign nationally and internationally. For a country like Liberia, the involvement of CSOs in maternal, newborn and child health advocacy is relatively new.
Under the leadership of the Liberia NGOs Network (LINNK), a series of awareness meetings and capacity building work on newborn and child survival issues with CSOs have already been held.
Now civil society organisations in Liberia have started to take maternal and newborn health discussions to the public and engage policy makers. They are also calling on the Liberian government to take some immediate and long term actions to get the country on track with with Millenium Development Goals 4 and 5.
With the level of CSOs involvement in Liberia, the EVERY ONE campaign is becoming a popular issue for the general public and policy makers. It is interesting to see and hear CSOs on local TV and radio talk shows discussing maternal newborn and child health issues rather than the usual political debate of who becomes president or parliamentarian in Liberia.
Providing up to date information on maternal newborn and child health, they call on their government to take specific actions to reach the goals set by 2015, with emphasis on the 2001 Abuja declaration of 15% national budget allocation.
All the callers on the program commend the discussants and express their appreciation to CSOs for promoting these issues. The issues are a major concern for the poor, hard to reach and most marginalized people in Liberia.
Truly, the survival of children and mothers is EVERY ONE’s business.
Find out about our EVERY ONE campaign
Read about our work in Liberia
Tags: campaign, child survival, civil society, maternal newborn and child health, Millenium Development Goals
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August 15th, 2010 at 8:52 PM
Great to hear about this, Anthony. It is only when the needless deaths of mothers and children become a major political issue that there will be changes. And the media is crucial to this. All over the world, governments check the media constantly and worry about any critical comments. Only by building social movements against maternal and child mortality – and ensuring that the media report these movements – will we be able to put it at the top of the political agenda. The work you are doing in Liberia is an excellent example of this.