Kahnpur is a small village in south western Bangladesh, home to about 200 households of farmers, nestled between green rice paddies and ponds. Except it’s not – its people uprooted on mass, it now sits about a kilometre and a half away on the outskirts of the town of Tala.
Global efforts to improve the health and wellbeing in the developing world are paying off. However, one area where insufficient progress is being made is family planning. There are 215 million women around the world who would like to delay or avoid pregnancy but do not have access to modern family planning methods.
Today I attended the launch of a new book, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, that analyses why some countries achieve good health outcomes despite having low income status.
While child survival has tremendously improved in the past decades — the global under-five mortality rate has fallen by 32% between 1990 and 2009 — many children still live without the most basic healthcare services. Some 40 million children in 25 developing countries with high levels of child mortality are living in healthcare deserts.
Children led me through the tight winding lanes of the Bihari camp. They were helping to carry out a survey on natural hazards in their area, an urban slum in Dhaka. I could see the slum houses stretching off into the distance. Long, narrow and no more than a metre wide, the rubbish-strewn lanes between the houses were filled with people carrying metal polls for house building, and others taking chickens to market.
Women weren’t told about the cyclone warning system, so were understandably reluctant to pack up their kids and all their belongings when the men of the village were running around shouting “Number four! It’s a number four! Pack up your stuff it’s a number four!” The women in the community had no idea what a number four was, or that it had any relation to cyclones.
At the preschool, I meet five-year-old Elton. His three-year-old sister, Reddy, wanders nearby, seeming curious. Elton’s eyes gleam when asked about school – he says he loves it. His teacher, Geeta, says that he’s been a regular and keen student in his one year here. She has 17 children in her class, nine boys and eight girls, aged four to five.
Did you know that pneumonia is the one disease that kills the greatest number of children under five throughout the world? The greater irony however is that it’s easily treatable. Pneumonia claims 1.5 million young lives every year. The figure stands at 50,000 children in Bangladesh which means 137 Bangladeshi children die every day from pneumonia! It’s a staggering sum.
Child mortality does not only mean the same everywhere, but it also reflects multiple deprivations. It indicates low income, poor nutrition and inability to seek healthcare. Using child mortality rates together with other indicators of well-being to compare poverty across countries gives a better picture of deprivation. It also implies that poverty reduction should go beyond increasing income, but more importantly, improving access to basic services and opening up more opportunities.
The mummy bloggers were celebs, yet they were so human. I thought they made such excellent ambassadors with their ready laughter, willingness to help and understand.
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