Actress Ashley Jensen is a familiar face on screen both here and in the States, best known for her roles in the television series Ugly Betty, Extras and Catastrophe.
In 2011, Ashley voiced an appeal film for ITV’s Born to Shine series, which raised money for Save the Children. The film told the story of Chotti, a young girl on the streets of Delhi, India. Ashley was so moved by Chotti's story that she made a trip to the slums of Delhi to meet families and children there.
Ashley says, “The healthworkers I met work tirelessly in these hugely populated slums in Delhi, educating women on nutrition during pregnancy, breastfeeding, birth control, monitoring babies, vaccinating babies, and showing them what signs to look for in potentially life-threatening illnesses like diarrhoea, untreated skin diseases, and pneumonia.
"It's illnesses such as these that to us, living in the Western world, are a simple inconvenience and a quick trip to the chemist, but to children in the slum colonies they are a matter of life or death.”
Since then, Ashley has visited our health programmes in Tanzania to learn more about the vital need for life saving equipment, medicines and trained midwives to prevent babies dying from preventable causes.