Here in Melbourne, Save the Children Australia is playing a very active part in the UN DPI/NGO conference on global health. Today Jasmine Whitbread and I took part in a discussion about the Millennium Development Goals and lessons learned for any targets which might apply after 2015.
A new survey published this week tells us that eight out of ten among the middle-class in cities across India underestimate the levels of child mortality. But does it actually matter what the middle classes think?
Every year figures on child deaths are released to track how countries are progressing towards Millennium Development Goal 4—to reduce the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Reductions in under-five mortality are usually reported as national averages however, masking the unequal progress across different groups within a country. A new Save the Children paper entitled “Inequalities in child survival: looking at wealth and other socio-economic disparities in developing countries” outlines a number of important issues surrounding children’s unequal survival prospects.
Sierra Leone’s Free Health Care Initiative is becoming pretty famous for a boring policy change on health system financing. And Naomi Campbell isn’t even involved. There is something about the boldness, the high-profile and the level of commitment with which Sierra Leone announced the total removal of charges for healthcare for children under 5, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers that has inspired people. I am in Freetown in Sierra Leone to learn how it is progressing and what we can glean from this for other countries.
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.
Where you’re born and who you’re born to in Nigeria has a big impact on your likelihood to survive. Those coming from the poorest households are 2.5 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than those from the richest households. Children in the north-west are also over two times more likely to die than those in the south-west of the country.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Niger’s independence from France and there’s a party mood in the capital, Niamey. The office is closed, Ramadan begins in about a week, and people are taking the chance to have fun.
We need community workers, cars and fuel to physically go out, find these children, bring them back and save their lives.
And we need to help families in the longer term. They need food now, but they also needs to be protected from having to sell seeds and tools for just a few days of food.
Today I’m recovering from the last three-day-marathon of the heads of state meeting at the African Union summit. With the theme of “Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and Development in Africa,” this summit offered the perfect chance to mobilise action to save the lives of millions of children and mothers.
We’ve been worried that this would be a silent emergency where few people knew or cared about children in Niger, but this week alone people have been in touch from Austalia, Korea, Italy, Spain, Canada and the UK – it’s great that this crisis is making it onto the world’s media agenda.
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