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.
Save the Children has long been the NGO with the clearest principles about building health systems. The question we have always faced is – how do you turn discussions about health systems into something accessible, interesting, inspiring and…well…sexy?
Save the Children has put photography at the heart of it’s campaigns right from the beginning. For our first ever campaign in 1919, Eglantyne Jebb (our amazing founder) distributed posters in Trafalgar Square featuring incredibly emaciated children.
There is much to do. With maternal and newborn health a key priority for us in countries where there is a high HIV prevalence, we must rise to the challenge of preventing mother to child transmission of HIV, which is a cost-effective and proven intervention that can save the lives of hundreds of thousands.
‘Health systems research’… It’s sometimes easy to be put off by the technical jargon, but work in this field can play a very important role in making health care available to those who need it most.
Teaching children in a languages they don’t use at home is causing big problems with school dropouts, exam failures and pupils not achieving their potential, particularly in rural areas of developing countries. Find out what’s being done to tackle the issue and add your voice to the debate on what should be done to stop language being a barrier to learning for millions of children.
