Each year International Women’s Day provides the opportunity to celebrate womanhood. While it’s important to celebrate, let’s not forget the scale on which the rights of women and girls continue to be violated every single day. Globally, up to six out of every ten women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.
The UK Government has announced its review of bilateral aid and multilateral aid – basically aid that is given direct to countries and aid which goes through international organisations. One big winner today seems to be GAVI – the Global Alliance for vaccines and immunisations – which Save the Children is supporting strongly.
Yesterday’s announcement by Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, signifies an exciting shift for his department. DFID’s aid reviews have been an opportunity for it to take a step back to comprehensively consider where, when and how effectively its money is spent. In particular, Save the Children welcomes the strong focus on results, impact and only funding high-performing multilateral agencies.
The Global Monitoring Report (GMR) on Education for All launched today. This report gives an up-to-date review of the state of education worldwide. This year’s report focuses on a huge crisis: the neglect of education in conflict-affected fragile states. According to the report, 28 million children are not in school and are surrounded by conflict and poverty (making up 42% of the global number of children out of school).
It shouldn’t matter whether you’re born in a country that features large in the UK Government’s national security radar, or you’re born in a country that’s just plain poor. Wherever you’re born, no child is born to die.
Earlier this week I attended a two-day seminar to look at the role of the academic and research community in meeting the Millennium Development Goals that relate to child and maternal health. It was suggested that the people who produce research and those who use it – such as Save the Children – are living on different planets.
I am at the 128th annual meeting of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Executive Board in Geneva, which sets the agenda for the World Health Assembly (WHA) in May, and just presented a statement during the session on health system strengthening, based on the reports prepared by the Secretariat. It was very exciting to be given the opportunity to speak on behalf of Save the Children UK to such a senior audience, including the Director General of the WHO!
It was rainy when I visited Abuja, the capital of Nigeria six months ago to do some research and data analysis for a report we were supporting. Now it’s warm and sunny. It’s not only the sun that’s reason to be happy about this visit though. I’m launching the revised edition of our report, “Saving newborn lives in Nigeria: newborn health in the context of Integrated Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Strategy”, with colleagues.
Adolescent girls and boys face many obstacles in getting the sexual and reproductive healthcare they need to stay safe and healthy. So I warmly welcome the emphasis the Department for International Development has put on the sexual and reproductive heath of adolescent girls and boys in their ‘Choice for women: planned pregnancies, safe births and healthy newborns’, published in December.
When I first heard that DFID (the Department for International Development) was planning to invest up to £ 500 million a year in work to tackle malaria, I was worried. Malaria is a hugely important health issue, 1 in 5 child deaths in Africa are the due to malaria. My worries were around the effect a one-theme plan might have on health systems. DFID have in the past been a champion of health system strengthening, was this about to change?
